L'économie de l'Australie (document en anglais)

Australia is highly industrialized and manufactured goods account for most of the gross domestic product. Its chief industries include mining, food processing, and the manufacture of industrial and transportation equipment, chemicals, iron and steel, textiles, machinery, and motor vehicles. Australia has valuable mineral resources, including coal, iron, bauxite, copper, tin, gold, silver, uranium, nickel, tungsten, mineral sands, lead, zinc, natural gas, and petroleum; the country is an important producer of opals and diamonds.

The country is self-sufficient in food, and the raising of sheep and cattle and the production of grain have long been staple occupations. Tropical and subtropical produce—citrus fruits, sugarcane, and tropical fruits—are also important, and there are numerous vineyards and dairy and tobacco farms.

Australia maintains a favorable balance of trade. Its chief export commodities are coal, iron ore, gold, meat, wool, and alumina, cereals, and machinery and transport equipment. The leading imports are machinery, transportation and telecommunications equipment, computers and office machines, crude oil, and petroleum products. Australia's economic ties with Asia and the Pacific Rim have become increasingly important, with China, Japan, and the United States being its main trading partners.

Most of the rich farmland and good ports are in the east and particularly the southeast, except for the area around Perth in Western Australia. Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Adelaide are the leading industrial and commercial cities. There was considerable industrial development in the last two decades of the 20th cent. While the Australian economy fell into a severe recession in the late 1980s, it experienced an extended period of growth beginning in the 1990s. It then suffered somewhat from the Asian economic slump of the 1990s and from the "Big Dry" drought of the early 21st cent., while also benefiting from increased mineral exports to China during the same period.

II. Investing in Australia

To invest in Australia or any other country many characteristics should be taken in consideration, in order to make the investment beneficial and successful. It exist a lot of criteria that show how good a country to invest in. in this paper it will discuss the most important ones such as the GDP/GDP per capital, employment, politic stability, easiness to invest in, free trading with other countries…

1. GDP and GDP per capital

“GDP represents the market value of all goods and services produced by the economy during the period measured, including personal consumption, government purchases, private inventories, paid-in construction costs and the foreign trade balance (exports are added, imports are subtracted).”

In 2014 the GDP is US$1.525 trillion and going back in the history starting 2008 (with a GDP of US $1054.6 billion) the Australian economy is among the largest growing and healthy economies.

According to the international monetary fund Australia GDP per capital is

$67,722 in 2014 it is ranked the 5th.

The Treasurer Joe Hockey has cautiously welcomed higher than expected growth figures in the latest national accounts, He said” I remain positive about the outlook for the Australian economy and the trends revealed today we are headed in the right direction”

2. employment

The well-been of a country is indicated by its rate of employment and the number of hours per week worked.

The unployement rate decreased to 6.10% in December 2014 to 6.20% in November 2014, the number of employed persons rose from 37,400 to 11,679,400. Full-time employment increased by 41,600 persons to 8,105,300 persons (reported by the Australian bureau of statistic)

3. The workforce

The Australian labor force is one of the most educated, multicultural and multilingual in the world. Australia has the world’s highest secondary education enrolment rate; it has almost 40 per cent of the workforce holding a tertiary qualification or advanced diploma. It is expected to outperform many other developed countries for labor productivity growth in terms of GDP per person employed. More than a quarter of Australia’s labor force of 12.3 million people was

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