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.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/australia-pays-the-price-for-relying-on-china-20150924-gjulu2

Andrew Charlton: Oxford Doctorate

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.

Sources:

http://media.wix.com/ugd/f01257_ed9c2ace99554de886a0206db13f57b2.pdf

http://www.oecd.org/economy/china-economic-forecast-summary.htm

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.

Sources:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/publications/books/2007/Ozonomics.aspx

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp235.pdf

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.

Andrew Charlton co -authior of Fair Trade For All

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of the New York Times bestselling book Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz here joins with fellow economist Andrew Charlton to offer a challenging and controversial argument about how globalization can actually help Third World countries to develop and prosper. 

In Fair Trade For All, Stiglitz and Charlton address one of the key issues facing world leaders today--how can the poorer countries of the world be helped to help themselves through freer, fairer trade? To answer this question, the authors put forward a radical and realistic new model for managing trading relationships between the richest and the poorest countries. 

Their approach is designed to open up markets in the interests of all nations and not just the most powerful economies, to ensure that trade promotes development, and to minimize the costs of adjustments.

Visit http://www.amazon.com.au/Fair-Trade-All-Promote-Development-ebook/dp/B005C8CZ76 to buy or more about the book. 

Quarterly Essay 54 Dragon's Tail by Andrew Charlton

In Dragon’s Tail, Andrew Charlton explores the supercharged rise of China and considers Australia’s future as the Chinese dragon stirs and shifts.

China’s rise has been perhaps the most significant economic event in two centuries, occurring 100 times more quickly and on a scale 1000 times larger than Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Since 2000, Australia has been an essential part of this transformation, providing the raw materials to feed China’s frantic manufacture of steel vertebrae for everything from cars and trucks to railways, apartments and office towers. 

China’s appetite for resources has made us richer than ever before, but it has also drained the competitiveness from many parts of our economy, leaving us vulnerable.

Visit http://www.amazon.com.au/Quarterly-Essay-54-Dragons-Tail-ebook/dp/B00JE1HU5Y for complete information or buy.  

Andrew Charlton’s eight growth prospects for the Australia

Andrew Charlton is a well known personality in Australia; He was a former Senior Economic Advisor to the Australian Prime Minister. Currently he is serving at AlphaBeta, a strategy advisory business that serves clients throughout Australia and Asia. 

In this Blog post Andrew share the eight growth prospects for the Australia.

Andrew Charlton’s eight growth prospects for the australia from Andrew Charlton

Most Acclaimed Books by Andrew Charlton

Andrew Charlton is a former Senior Economic Advisor to Australian Prime Minister, who currently serves as the director at AlphaBeta Advisors, a strategy advisory agency that serves clients in Asia-Pacific region and has offices in Singapore and Sydney.  Andrew Charlton is a renowned economist and has written many acclaimed books on Economics. 

Here is a list of some of his most popular books:

• http://www.readings.com.au/products/1641731/fair-trade-for-all-how-trade-can-promote-development
• http://www.readings.com.au/products/6525085/ozonomics
• http://www.readings.com.au/products/12954498/man-made-world-choosing-between-progress-and-planet
• http://www.bookdepository.com/Dragons-Tail-Andrew-Charlton/9781863956567
• http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2655180-ozonomics

 You may also visit http://www.readings.com.au/collection/andrew-charlton for more information about Andrew.

 

Andrew Charlton: Cleaning Up the Mess

Andrew Charlton attended the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference as a Senior Advisor to then-Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and recalls his surprise that even with the eyes of the world steadfastly on it, nothing of substance at this “summit to save the world” was accomplished.

Prime Minister Rudd – one of the many world leaders present for the conference in 2009 – admitted to being disappointed with the way things turned out, he recalls. Afterward, there was a lot of finger-pointing. “Through the haze of the fatigue and crushed expectations there was one outstanding question: how could this have happened?”

There were no easy answers. President Barack Obama acknowledged afterward that the conference did not achieve enough, while environmental activists derided some of the participants as “guilty men and women fleeing to the airport,” in the aftermath of the failed talks. And journalists characterized the Copenhagen talks as “a historic failure that will live in infamy.”

But the fundamental problem, Andrew Charlton later reflected, was not with any particular nation or alliance. What really happened was that the conference in Copenhagen exposed “the central dilemma of our century,” which boils down to a choice between progress and the planet.

“Our planet is home to seven billion people,” he wrote. “Of these, roughly one billion live in rich countries...[whose leaders] arrived in Copenhagen persuaded of the urgency of the environmental challenges facing” the earth.” The remaining six billion of Earth’s inhabitants live in developing countries. A third of them are so poor that they barely have enough food. The chief concern in these countries is poverty, while leaders of developing countries came to Copenhagen “with their own priorities.”

The point was made bluntly, Andrew Charlton recounted, by a Chinese official who said: “You cannot tell people who are struggling to earn enough to eat that they need to reduce their emission.” And a negotiator for a Latin American country frankly told him: “Your countries have prospered by exploiting the world’s resources...how can I tell the slum dwellers they must stay poor to help clean up your mess?”

For some two decades, Andrew Charlton wrote, wealthy nations have tried to force poor ones to accept their solutions to climate change. But these poor countries, as a group, are having none of it. “The lesson of Copenhagen is that rich countries can no longer impose solutions to global problems that ignore poor countries or assume their acquiescence in the rich countries’ agenda.”

Andrew Charlton earned a doctorate in Economics from Oxford University, and at present is the director of AlphaBeta.

Visit https://www.quarterlyessay.com/author/andrew-charlton for more information. 

Andrew Charlton: China Propping Up Bad Investments

Andrew Charlton is an Oxford-educated economist and a co-founder and director at AlphaBeta, a strategy advisory business with offices in Sydney and Singapore.

He is frequently tapped by media outlets to share his expertise on economic matters. During the summer of 2015, after the economy of China showed continued signs of slowing, he was one of several economists and strategists approached by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 

China is Australia’s largest two-way trading partner, and the ABC’s report began by observing that some economists fear China’s struggling economy will lead to serious problems with for Australia, and that central banks around the world will be unable to help.

Andrew Charlton traveled to China to find out how the changes to its economy will affect Australia. He says the potential is there for even more challenges to China’s financial markets. “The great fear with China’s situation at the moment is that we’ve seen this movie before,” he told ABC. 

“We’ve seen State-led investment growth delivered in the Soviet Union in the 30s, in Brazil in the 60s, in Japan and Taiwan in the 70s and 80s, in some of the east Asian countries, in the 80s and 90s, and in almost every case, really strong growth led by State investment reached a point where that investment became unproductive and there was a long period of slow growth that followed it.”

China is throwing money at the stock market to support it, he said. “They have provided more than three hundred billion dollars in support for – to refinance local government debt. They’ve provided more than one hundred billion dollars in order to continue the infrastructure growth right around their cities.” These moves will solve problems in the short term, he said, but do not bode well for the long term.

Its current spending binge, in other words, may simply be propping up bad investments. “The big question is, is that investment productive?” Andrew Charlton said on ABC. “Or is it the type of investment that will be unproductive, and ends up in bad loans and slow growth?”

The head of the International Education Association of Australia said they are always concerned whenever there is a major shift in any market. “The China market accounts for thirty-five percent of an eighteen billion dollar a year industry to Australia. We have to make sure we do everything we can to encourage that market.”

Still, the economic future of Australia depends heavily on what happens in China. “Australia and China’s economies are remarkably complementary,” Andrew Charlton said. “And it’s for that reason that Australia was tied to China on the way up, during China’s enormous growth phase, and will be tied to China on the way down as their economy slows.”

Visit https://www.themonthly.com.au/author/andrew-charlton for more information.