Blog #6: Australia Economic History University of Sydney

After a wonderful night at the Tiffany, we took the train to the University of Sydney where we would have our lecture about Australia’s Economy by Evan Jones.  Throughout the lecture Jones talked about Australia’s primary production, exports, trading partners, and origin of immigrants changing from 1788 to now. Around 1788, Evan Jones highlights that there wasn’t much going on in terms of production besides sealing and whaling until 1820’s when wool took off as an export for the economy. Shortly after in the 1850’s gold had rapid growth in terms of exports. Now, Australia has stayed with being a major export of its natural resources including coal, iron, gold, and natural gas. Australia’s trade partners back in the 1780’s included the United States, Japan in the 1960’s and more recently China. This change in exports and trade partners has happened because of different countries needs, especially when their country does not offer resources like Australia and the change from Australia being a convict colony to a world leader in export of coal and main place for immigrants from Europe and Asia.

        As the Article by Andrew Wells talked about imperialism, which is essentially the policy of extending a nation authority by territorial acquisition over other nations, he mentioned how this affected Australia.  He says that the imperial state weakened its direct political control and the colonial states because enmeshed in furthering capitalist development, commodity production. This supports the facts mentioned above about how their economy was first not selling many commodities then got into gold and coal mining. Today Australia’s primary trade and finance partners include China, Japan, Korea, India, and the United States. Also, in the packet Jones gave us there are more statistics about the United States investment relationship being about A$514,305,000 in 2009.

        Jones also did a great job providing an overview of Australia’s macroeconomic performance since WWII. In the 1950’s Australia boomed with agriculture expansion and manufacturing development such as autos and petrochemicals. The 1960’s began a massive resource boom exported to mostly Japan. This boom was followed by a general economic crisis in the mid 1970’s.  In the 1990’s there is another resource boom mostly to China.  These events changed Australia’s GDP, unemployment, inflation and external balance greatly. Currently, Australia’s GDP and inflation has rose 3% in the past year. The external balance on current accounts in Australia has been negative which means that the imports have been greater than the exports. This is something that Australia needs to keep in mind and a close eye on because that puts a lot of money in other countries hands rather than in their economy. Being on the University of Sydney campus was amazing! The old buildings gave a prestigious feel and made the area a gorgeous site. Then the girls & I decided to go get tee shirts from the University.

 All of us got food to go grill in the back area of the Meriton & I finally got a picture with a kangaroo from the other day when my camera died. :)