The Staples Thesis, local models and competitiveness: the Western Australian economy over the 2001–2011 resource boom

ABSTRACT Conventionally, the Staples Thesis constitutes a hypothesis about both the historical and the geographical particularity of the developmental trajectories of resource-dependent economies (Staples Theory) and a methodology that prioritizes contextual or local knowledge (Staples Method). Situating the Staples Thesis in the conceptual framework of regulation theory, this paper develops a spatial econometric model of the dynamics of resource-dependent economies that is sensitive to place-based contingency. This model is grounded in a conceptual framework that distinguishes between a productivity regime and a demand regime whose qualitative properties depend on the assemblage of governance, regulatory and institutional norms that determine the coherence of the relationship between the structure of production and consumption. Within the limits of data availability, a spatial extension of a reduced-form Kaldorian growth model is employed to empirically test Staples Theory by focusing on the differential impact of both the demand regime and the productivity regime on the relative economic performance of Western Australian localities over the course of the recent (2001–11) resource boom.