Patterns and Determinants of Export Specialisation in Australian Manufacturing

Abstract

This paper examines the patterns and determinants of Australia's revealed comparative advantage in manufactured exports. The results show that Australia's greatest comparative advantage is in technology-intensive and skillintensive products. Export competitiveness appears to be positively influenced by the intensity of intra-industry trade, overseas investment, research-anddevelopment expenditure intensity and human-capital intensity. On the other hand, high protection has been a major deterrent to international competitiveness.

An Increasing Role for Small Business in New Zealand

“…Yet observation of manufacturing industry trade flows in particular indicates that there are many industries engaged in intraindustry trade, exporting and importing the same class of products. Following the work of Ratnayake (1990), the theory is that large research and development (R&D) sophisticated countries export their new products to all other countries but only import similar products from countries at least as sophisticated as themselves. The less sophisticated countries are the net importers of the sophisticated products.…”

A Note on Industry Concentration and Trade Perfor Mance: New Zealand Manufacturing 1985–1995

“…This suggests that, following the liberalisation of the mid 1980s, the New Zealand industries most likely to be laggard exporters and/or assailed by cheap imports would be those harbouring the large X-inefficient monopolies. On the other hand there is the argument that international competitiveness derives from operating efficiencies due to realised economies of scale (see, eg, Goodman & Ceyhun 1976;NZ Trade Development Board 1990, p. 58;Ratnayake 1990). It is this line of argument which is often used to justify amalgamations which demonstrably raise concentration levels in domestic industries.…”

“…However, the balance of the findings would deny any positive association between trade performance and industry concentration. Indeed, Glejser, Jacquemin and Petit (1980), Pickering and Sheldon (1984) and Ratnayake (1990Ratnayake ( , 1994 report negative associations, and Utton and Morgan (1983, p. 109) remained sceptical after one of the most detailed investigations of this relationship. Owen (1973) did find trade performance improving with concentration but only up to concentration levels of 50%.…”