Composite Measures of Social, Economic and Demographic Regional Differentiation in Australia: Application of Multi-Stage Principal Component Method to Aggregate Data Analysis

This paper describes the application of the two-stage principal component method to analyse Australian aggretate/regional/ data. Statistical indicators of social standing, economic structure and demographic features are analysed separately in order to obtain composite measures of various complex characteristics of the regions in each of these domains. The method does not assume statistical independency of principal components, so the relations between them are examined. The index of regional socio-economic status as well as its relations to other characteristics are of the main interest.