Unit 1
Unit 2
Trade and Aid
A complete list of trading partners for Australia would be very long – we trade with over 150 countries. As you can imagine, some of these countries are more important to us than others.
Today, Australian exports are more likely to end up in Asia than in any other part of the world. This was not always the case; prior to the development of the European Union, a significant percentage of our exports went to the United Kingdom. Trading laws in Europe now mandate that they must try to find a European source for their products before looking elsewhere, and as a result, the Australian economy needed to become more flexible.
While the figures quoted below do vary from year to year, the rankings do not change much at all. At the moment, Australia’s top five export destinations are:
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20.4% |
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11.9% |
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7.7% |
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The |
6.4% |
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5.7% |
As you can see, our top three export destinations are all in Asia, and more than half of the top ten countries are in this region. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that successive Prime Ministers from the time of Malcolm Fraser (who held the position from 1975 to 1983) have spoken about the importance of the Asian region for our economy.
On the other hand, the source of our imports is a different story. Australia relies on manufactured products, and as a result some of our imports come from countries that have comparatively low wages. However, you will notice that this is not always the case....
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13.8% |
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The |
13.6% |
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10.3% |
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6.3% |
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5.2% |
In particular, Germany and Singapore tend to have very high wages by world standards. In this case, we tend to be buying highly specialised items from these countries. For example, the German economy is renowned for producing high quality motor vehicles (such as Mercedes Benz and BMW), and also electronic goods (such as Bang and Olufsen, Loewe and Grundig). These tend to be prestige items, and as such we are willing to pay a higher price for them. As the quality of manufactured goods from Asia increases, it will be interesting to see whether or not these companies will be able to maintain their market share.
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