Economics

By James Laurenceson

Chinese investors remain prominent relative to those from other countries but marginal compared with local buyers. More than a year of heightened compliance activity by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has yielded little evidence that foreign investment rules have been widely flouted.

On September 8 2016 the Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI) at the University of Technology Sydney released an independent report on Chinese-language media in Australia.    

The report is authored by Wanning Sun, a Professor of Media and Communication at UTS with a decade of experience conducting academic research into the sector.

Professor Sun details a rapidly changing media landscape that outsiders on the one hand find inscrutable but also regularly place at the heart of the Chinese government’s attempts to exert soft power.  

1. Education is Australia’s largest services export, worth $19.4 billion in 2015, making it the third largest export behind iron ore and coal.[1]

2. Globally, China is the number one country of origin for students enrolling in higher education abroad.[2]

Chinese students comprise 17 percent of the global total of tertiary-level, internationally mobile students.[3]

By James Laurenceson

Note: This article originally appeared in The Conversation, August 25 2016.

By James Laurenceson

Note: This article appeared in the Australian Financial Review, August 25 2016.

Last week Treasurer Scott Morrison officially killed off the prospect of foreign investors taking a 50.4 per cent share of the lease to operate NSW electricity distributor Ausgrid, citing national security risks.

Bids by China’s State Grid for electricity distribution assets in South Australia (2012) and Victoria (2013) were approved on the basis that they were in the national interest. On Thursday Treasurer Scott Morrison blocked State Grid’s bid, along with that of Cheung Kong Infrastructure’s, for NSW electricity distributor Ausgrid. He said it was his preliminary view the deal was contrary to the national interest on the grounds of national security. On Friday the Treasurer said that Ausgrid’s assets and the structure of the deal was different to previous cases. 

A decision by Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison on whether to approve the partial sale of NSW electricity distributor, Ausgrid, is expected shortly.

1. In March only three companies made the shortlist to buy a 50.4 percent share of NSW electricity distributor Ausgrid. All were Chinese. Since then one has dropped out leaving State Grid, a Chinese state-owned company, and Cheung Kong Infrastructure, a Chinese privately-owned company, as the only bidders.[1]

By James Laurenceson

Note: This article originally appeared in the Lowy Interpreter, July 28 2016.

The lights are still on in Manila.

That must come as quite a surprise to defence hawks who like to beat the drum that the sale of New South Wales electricity distributor Ausgrid to a Chinese company could compromise our national security and be contrary to the national interest.

This paper begins by showing that even after conditioning for factors that might justifiably lead to a country having relatively high leverage, China remains a debt outlier. In this sense China can be regarded as over-leveraged and its debt may present a potential risk to growth and financial stability. The corporate sector is central to China’s debt story, accounting for two-thirds of the total. The corporate sector has also been mostly responsible for China’s leverage cycles, including the leveraging up since 2008 and an earlier deleveraging phase starting in 2003.

1. In 2015 the value of Australia’s goods and services exports to the UK stood at $8.8bn and $23.5bn to the EU as a whole. This compares with $91.3bn to China.[1]

2. Over the past decade the value of Australia’s goods and services exports to the UK fell by $0.6bn, while they increased by $0.4bn to the EU as a whole. This compares with an increase of $71.1bn to China.[2]