Research Projects

The 21 st Century promises to be a challenging era for urban planning. The University of Sydney 's Planning Research Centre looks forward to expanding its increasingly important role as a forum for research, debate and discussion in all quarters of the profession. Established in 1964 at the University of Sydney , the Centre within its membership is a cross section of individuals and organisations in the field of urban and regional planning, policy and development.

The Planning Research Centre strives to undertake meaningful Research projects that assist in the future planning of Sydney and its regions. These research projects need support and funds and the PRC aim to garner the support of organisations and the government both financially and in kind. For many of these projects the PRC also apply for funding from the Australian Research Council which, if successful, greatly assist in the carrying out of applied research into problems in the field of concern of the Centre.

Current projects

The Impact of State and Local Taxes on Local Economic Growth

This study was financed by the US National Science Foundation for 2008-2010.

The research team consists of Alan Peters at the University of Sydney, Tim Bartik at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, and Peter Fisher and Richard Funderburg at the University of Iowa.

For the past 40 years there has been a considerable econometric work on the impact of state and local taxes on growth. The outcome of this work is unclear with a slight majority of studies showing little or no impact and other studies indicating the opposite. Possible reasons for the conflicting results are that studies typically use dedicated data sets and that econometric modeling has advanced considerably in recent years with the result that different studies often make use of different econometric advances.

We are performing a meta-econometric study of taxes on growth. This means trying to identify the impact of using particular datasets and particular econometric methods on the results. Identifying these will given us a much better sense of whether state and local taxes do, in fact, have some effect on local economic growth.

Finding new economic drivers for sea change (coastal) and similar rapidly growing communities in Australia

This project is an ARC Linkage Project.

The project aims to create a suite of novel assessment and modelling tools to enable Sea Change Communities to optimize both their economic development options and the quality of their coastal environments. These tools will enable Sea Change Communities to gain an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the economic drivers of their local economies - in particular, the relationships between tourism, other economic development, and natural resources - and to pursue strategies based on each community's new human capital and other resources.

In particular, this project will develop methodologies for:
- using these tools to translate research findings into public policy at the local community level in rapidly growing communities: and
- applying these tools to outer-metropolitan areas with economies based narrowly on such industries as tourism, extraction or services with new populations and sensitive environmental and related issues.