Journal publications

Global value chains (GVCs) are facing the greatest challenges from significant geopolitical changes. Combined with the COVID-19 pandemic shock, the energy transition and the increasing uncertainties, global value chains are at risk and need to be rebuilt to strengthen resilience.

Australia's discussion of trade with China has seen the frame of opportunity replaced with that of risk. Beijing's decision in 2020 to respond to political disputes with Canberra by disrupting Australian exports has energised calls to mitigate risk by deploying public policy with the objective of reducing trade with China. To date, the Australian government has largely resisted these calls. This chapter explains that businesses in the Australia-China trade corridor already have access to a host of economic and legal mitigations.

Foreign capital and buyers are often blamed for pushing up housing prices and reducing the supply of affordable housing in Australia. We examine this issue by assessing the impact of Chinese macroprudential policies, such as the limitation on currency transactions (LCT), on Sydney housing prices.

Perceived threats to sovereignty stemming from trade exposure to China have led to calls for the Australian government to embrace the concept of ‘trusted trade’. This involves using policy levers to drive trade towards markets that have capitals more geopolitically aligned with Canberra and finds practical expression in forms such as ‘friend-shored’ supply chains.

A narrative has emerged in Australia since May 2020 that attributes disruption of Australian exports to China to China’s authoritarian political system and presents the local predicament as unsurprising given past attempts by Beijing at economic coercion affecting other countries. Further, the Australian public has been told that strategic friends are rallying to provide a collective defence and these countries too are seeking greater economic distance from China. The strands of this narrative serve to soothe strategic anxieties and deflect attention away from choices made by Canberra.

As the world’s largest developing country, China is marching towards ambitious climate goals of achieving peak carbon by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. Given that China is the largest buyer of Australia’s iron ore and one of the largest buyers of Australia’s coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG), such climate efforts could be expected to impact Australia profoundly. This chapter examines how China’s transition to carbon neutrality will affect the Australian economy at the national and state levels and by industry.

This paper quantifies the effects of shocks in bilateral political relations on Australia’s merchandise goods exports to China between 2001 and 2020. Using a vector autoregression framework, our estimates suggest that short-term fluctuations in political relations have no long-run effects on Australia’s aggregate export growth to China over this period, nor in any of three sub-periods analysed.

Australia has always been sensitive to shifts in the balance of power both globally and within its own region, the Asia Pacific. This concern has been amplified over the past decade due to the parallel rise of China and the relative decline of the United States. These realities have framed an ongoing debate in Australia about whether continued reliance on the U.S. alliance for security is either feasible or prudent. This chapter presents two major arguments.

If successfully realised, the Belt and Road Initiative will be the most ambitious and expansive developmental project the world has ever seen. It is not, however, unprecedented. In the aftermath of the Second World War the United States developed what was then an equally unprecedented and ambitious initiative designed to simultaneously facilitate the (re)development of some of the world’s key economies and reinforce its own position as the leader of the western world. Both the American Marshall Plan and China’s BRI are important expressions of geoeconomic influence and power.

In 2020 Australia’s political relations with China plumbed new depths. Trade and other economic ties were also hit with disruption. Contributing to this deterioration, and complicating an accurate assessment of the consequences, has been a raft of misunderstandings. This article demystifies the bilateral trade tensions by exposing the deeper drivers of political friction, providing a critical assessment of the vulnerability of the Australian economy, and placing the current state of Australia’s relations with China in a comparative regional perspective.