Wednesday 16 December 2015

Australia’s Dwindling Economy – Andrew Charlton Blames Week Underlying Export Data

Much has changed during the ten months’ gap between last two G20 leaders submit. While at the first meeting, Australia has a greater economic growth than any other significant developed country, in the second meeting, things got entirely upside down.

Weakening export base has been sinking country’s GDP for two years as revealed by Andrew Charlton, director of economic advisory firm, AlphaBeta Advisors. Read the full story to catch more highlights.

Australia’s Thinning Export Base – Telling Stats by Andrew Charlton’s AlphaBeta Advisors

Australia hasn’t suffered from an economic recession since early 1990s, but the recent decline in its manufacturing sector and its thinning export base, which Andrew Charlton compared with ‘banana republic’, is putting the country’s economy in a somewhat depressing state. 

Here is the latest report on recent economic history of the country and its declining export capabilities, powered by stats provided by AlphaBeta Advisors, a consultancy firm run by ex-economic advisor Andrew Charlton.




Monday 14 December 2015

Andrew Charlton: Unsustainable Growth

Andrew Charlton is an Oxford-educated economist, and co-founder and Director at AlphaBeta, a strategy advisory business with offices in Singapore and Sydney. The firm serves clients throughout Australia and Asia.

He is particularly interested in the future of the Chinese economy, and how it impacts on the Australian economy. He and an AlphaBeta team traveled to China in late summer 2015 to research the matter. “In the course of meeting dozens of business leaders and government officials,” he wrote, “it became clear we were asking the wrong question.”

Many economists are projecting economic growth in China to gradually decline to 6.2 percent by 2017, as certain economic stimuli are not expected to have long-term sustainability. The important question for Australia, says Andrew Charlton, is: “How can we adapt to ensure we continue to profit as China’s economy changes?”



Andrew Charlton andhis colleagues at AlphaBeta have been watching the Chinese economy for a long time. “We warned at the height of the boom in 2011 that China’s growth was unsustainable,” he wrote. “We forecast growth to fall to between 5.0 - 7.5% and pointed out the diabolical consequences for Australian commodity prices.” At the time, his expressed views were not popular, “but they have since become a painful reality.”

Andrew Charlton and his fellow economists at AlphaBeta believe that China’s economy will continue to slow. But China’s economy, he says, is not just slowing down; it’s changing lanes. “For Australian businesses, [most] important...is the question of where it grows?”

Andrew Charlton holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Oxford and is a Rhodes Scholar. He was the Senior Economic Advisor to Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd from 2008 to 2010.
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Thursday 26 November 2015

Andrew Charlton: Funny and Frank



Andrew Charlton is an economist and author who has written several books and numerous articles, including Fair Trade For All, co-authored with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz.

His book Ozonomics: Inside the Myth of Australia’s Economic Superheroes has been hailed as a funny and frank book that examines Australia’s economic managers – that is, its politicians – and makes the case that prosperity is possible for everyone, even without having to ravage worker’s rights or perpetuate the imbalances that, historically, have been the hallmarks of trade between developing and developed countries.

Moreover, Ozonomics is an easy read, in spite the subject matter ordinary readers might find rough going. One reviewer went so far as to suggest that if politicians had half of the author’s ability to communicate complex ideas and identify sensible and workable solutions, everyone could feel better about the state of the economy.

One of the central ideas in Ozonomics is that Australian politicians have been took quick to take credit for economic good times. “A more accurate analysis of different governments’ contribution to Australia’s ‘miracle’ economy,” Andrew Charlton has written, “involves recognising that economic policies act with a lag, so the prosperity reaped today may have been sown many years before.”

Every government claim about the state of the economy deserves thorough scrutiny, Andrew Charlton says. “What we believe about the foundation of our wealth makes a great deal of difference to how we should pursue our future.” If Australia’s economic prosperity is a complex combination of long-term policies and global circumstances, he says, then the challenge is to make sure that constant public debate, with the aim of identifying the best policies to continue that prosperity, is encouraged and continued.

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Friday 20 November 2015

Andrew Charlton co-author of The Right to Trade book



Aid for trade is a fixture in the development landscape, accounting for approximately 25 per cent of total official development assistance (ODA), and is being positioned as a building block in the future development agenda beyond the 2015 expiry of the Millennium Development Goals. 
In
 The Right to Trade, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton argue that aid for trade has not delivered on its initial promise.
To create a genuinely pro-development trade liberalization agenda, the authors propose that a "right to trade" and a "right to development" be enshrined within the WTO’s dispute settlement system; and that aid for trade funds be consolidated into a coherent and predictable framework, where dedicated funds are committed by rich countries to a Global Trade Facility and dispersed through a transparent and competitive process. 
Visit http://www.amazon.com/The-Right-Trade-Rethinking-Agenda/dp/1849291055 to buy or more information about the book.

Quarterly Essay 44 Man-Made World by Andrew Charlton


Witnessing at first-hand the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference and wondering what went wrong, Andrew Charlton realised the truth of a colleague’s words: “The world is split between those who want to save the planet and those who want to save themselves.”
In this groundbreaking essay, Charlton discusses the rift that will shape our future: progress versus planet; rich versus poor. In recent times environmentalists have argued with mounting force that the growth of human activity on our planet is unsustainable.
We are, they claim, on a collision course with destiny. But, the developing world counters, environmental threats, dire as they may be, are not the only challenges we face. Indeed, these can seem a distant danger compared to the daily tragedies of life in slums and villages.