ABSTRACT There is an emerging international academic and policy-oriented literature that draws on economic evolutionary concepts and resilience thinking. Thus far, the design and implementation of resilience thinking appears to run ahead of clarity and rigorous empirical testing. In this article, we attempt to redress this imbalance by employing contemporary economic models and methods to explore the dynamics of four local economies from diverse locations in Western Australia. These localities have been identified as key regional growth centres by the Western Australian State Government. In the broader context, these localities represent a stress test for concepts developed in a different socio-economic context. The evidence shows that these localities lack resilience, displaying path dependence, with external “shocks” having long-run impacts on their developmental trajectories. Furthermore, there is considerable variability between the four centres in their response to shocks, reinforcing political and popular discourse about the existence of a patchwork economy.

中文翻译：

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西澳大利亚州区域首都的演变：1984–2014年的经验模型和政策分析

摘要出现了一些新兴的国际学术和政策导向文献，这些文献借鉴了经济进化的概念和弹性思想。到目前为止，弹性思维的设计和实现似乎要先于清晰和严格的经验测试。在本文中，我们试图通过采用当代经济模型和方法来探索这种不平衡，以探索西澳大利亚不同地区的四个地方经济的动力。西澳州政府已将这些地区确定为主要的地区增长中心。在更广泛的背景下，这些地区代表着对在不同社会经济背景下提出的概念进行的压力测试。证据表明，这些地区缺乏弹性，显示出路径依赖性，外部“冲击”对其发展轨迹具有长期影响。此外，四个中心对冲击的反应之间存在很大的差异，从而加强了关于零散经济存在的政治和民众讨论。