Thesis Defence: A Data-Driven Framework and Decision-Support Tool for Regional Diversification and Workforce Readiness in Canadian Cities
October 13 at 8:30 am - 12:30 pm
Rohan Sharma, supervised by Dr. Wouter Bam, will defend their thesis titled “A Data-Driven Framework and Decision-Support Tool for Regional Diversification and Workforce Readiness in Canadian Cities” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Applied Science in Electrical Engineering.
An abstract for Rohan Sharma’s thesis is included below.
Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Please email wouter.bam@ubc.ca to receive the Zoom link for this defence.
Abstract
Canadian regional economies have diverged over the past half century. Existing tools observe either what a region produces or who works there, rarely both, and rarely over a horizon long enough for structural change to be seen. This thesis addresses that problem through four contributions built on two analytically independent Canadian datasets.
The first constructs a fifty-year trajectory typology of 135 census metropolitan areas and census agglomerations across nine census waves. Each region-year is discretised onto a four-state grid crossing the Economic Complexity Index with portfolio breadth at within-year medians, and the nine-wave sequences are clustered by Optimal Matching and Ward linkage. Cutting the dendrogram at five clusters, retained for comparability with the German study this design adapts, yields five trajectory types. Mean complexity declines monotonically across them while mean portfolio breadth does not, so the two are distinct dimensions of regional industrial structure that a single complexity score collapses.
The second works at the job-cell level, the intersection of a region, an industry and an occupational group. Entry into a previously absent job-cell is modelled by a linear probability model with fixed effects for region, transition period, and industry in the saturated specification. Industrial relatedness density is associated with a higher probability of entry, significant at p < 0.001 across a nested specification ladder; in the saturated model a ten-point increase corresponds to a 3.6 percentage-point higher probability against a base rate of 10.1 per cent on the at-risk sample.
The third operates at the occupation level on a separate cross-section, adapting a requirement-sufficiency framework to seven British Columbia metropolitan areas and two target occupations. Readiness is the employment mass lying within a proximity threshold of a target’s attribute requirements. It depends heavily on where that threshold sits, and the metropolitan advantage widens as it rises: the binding constraint in smaller regions is not a general shortage of skilled workers but a shortage of workers positioned in the specific attribute neighbourhood the target requires.
The fourth is a designed artifact, the Regional Industry Explorer, developed as design science research to render these outputs usable by regional development practitioners.
