De‐industrialisation, financialisation and Australia’s macro‐economic trap
Transcript of De‐industrialisation, financialisation and Australia’s macro‐economic trap
De‐industrialisation, financialisation and Australia’s macro‐economic trap
Sally Wellera and Phillip O’Neillb
aCentre for Geography, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia, 3800.
bUrban Research Centre, University of Western Sydney, Bankstown, New South Wales,
Australia, 2200. [email protected]
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The seemingly inexorable decline of manufacturing in Australia is typically explained
by firm‐level competitiveness, especially labour costs, the challenges posed by a
peripheral location, and the (Dutch Disease) effects of Australia’s mining boom. We
argue that such explanations are insufficient, and look instead to the way that
processes of financialisation and the policy settings of other countries combine to
inflate the value of the Australian currency and render trade exposed industries
uncompetitive. We conclude that Australia is locked into a macroeconomic trap
through which the Global Financial Crisis is being exported to peripheral economies.
Keywords: manufacturing, Australia, financialisation, industry policy
JEL Classifications: N17, N67, O14, O16,
The question the Australian community needs to ask itself is do we want to be a
country that still makes things? Do we want to value‐add to our natural resources, or
do we want to become just one big sandpit for China and a tourism resort for North
Asia? (Howes, 2011)
Introduction
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While manufacturing industries in some advanced economies have experienced something of a post‐
financial crisis recovery, manufacturing firms in Australia are in crisis. In the six years since mid‐2008,
100,000 manufacturing jobs – or over ten percent of the sector’s workforce nationally – have been
lost (Borland, 2014). Tens of thousands more will disappear as the exit of the nation’s three
remaining automobile manufacturers – General Motors, Ford and Toyota – reverberates through
supply chains and regional economies. Commenting on the closure of a Philip Morris plant in
suburban Melbourne in April 2014, a spokesperson for the employer association Australian Industry
Group emphasised uncompetitive local cost factors: “…the strong dollar, the extent to which (our)
energy costs have risen, and the relatively high growth in unit labour costs over the past decade”
(Maher, 2014:4). As encapsulated in the opening quote from former union leader Paul Howes,
Australia’s capacity for ‘making things’ is under serious threat.
This paper insists that it is insufficient to explain the current crisis in terms of how firm‐scale
factors affect the manufacturing sector’s international competitiveness, a typical approach to
explanations of manufacturing decline. Rather, the paper proposes that the crisis in Australian
manufacturing has been created by currency appreciation arising from Australia’s resources boom
settings, as well as additional upward pressure on the currency as a result of the attractiveness of
the Australian dollar and Australian‐dollar‐denominated interest‐rate products to global financial
traders. We argue, therefore, that the contemporary decline in manufacturing in Australia is a
distanciated effect of a newly spatialised and financialised global capitalism. In effect, the global
financial crisis has been exported from its pan‐Atlantic origins in ways that now devalue returns to
Australian labour. Hence, by situating Australia’s recent manufacturing job losses within
macroeconomic policy‐making and currency trading we seek to expose the impacts of global
financialisation processes for working people in a resource dependent economy. The paper’s
theoretical contribution is to follow Sokol’s (2013:501) advice to “…inject[ing] finance and
financialisation into conceptualisations of economies and their uneven geographies” by showing
how post‐financial‐crisis revaluations at the national scale are producing deindustrialisation. Our
view is that this approach diverges from a deindustrialisation literature in geography that has
focused on institutional factors at regional, firm and workplace levels (Bailey et al. 2010; Dawley et
al., 2010; Safford, 2009; Pike, 2006; Gertler, 2004; Clark et al., 1986; Clark and Wrigley, 1997).
By placing manufacturing in the twin contexts of macroeconomic settings and currency
values we reveal the inseparability of deindustrialisation and financialisation. To make this
connection we employ a political economy approach where we see the fortunes of different industry
sectors as direct outcomes of the rearticulation of elements of the national economy in response to
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shifting global economic, regulatory and financial forces. In effect, the world’s core economies have
responded to crisis by means of a financialised macro‐economic ‘spatial fix’ that transports value
from the world’s peripheries to its core (see Amin, 1974). For small, open and resource dependent
economies a macro‐economic trap arises: while their exchange rates are subject to external
revaluations and shocks, they are not in a position deploy macroeconomic remedies. Although we
focus on Australia, our observations are relevant to other resource economies that are price‐takers
on world markets including New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Brazil and Chile.
The argument is structured as follows. The next section introduces explanations of
deindustrialisation and argues that these pay insufficient attention to the effects of financialisation
and macroeconomic policy settings. Section three describes the evolution of manufacturing in
Australia and explains the particular challenges faced by local manufacturers. It observes that
different forms of deindustrialisation have been dominant at different times. In section four we
argue that the recent post‐financial crisis phase of manufacturing decline is associated with the rapid
expansion of minerals exports and improving terms of trade, the effects of which are magnified by
currency‐based financial investments, including speculation, and other countries’ stimulus policies
that encourage re‐shoring of manufacturing capacity. As these forces inflate the price of the
Australian dollar, they accelerate the rate of manufacturing plant closures and job losses. This
financialised and globally open context, where the factors of production are no longer contained
nationally, thus produces a form of deindustrialisation attributable to the external repositioning of
nations in global circuits of capital rather than to internal sectoral reallocations of capital and labour.
The penultimate section debates whether long term manufacturing decline should be perceived as a
problem; whether it would matter if Australia was no longer a country that ‘made things’? We
conclude that financialisation and the use of macro‐economic policy instruments to stimulate core
economies can have the effect of intensifying deindustrialisation in peripheral resource‐rich
economies. While geographies of manufacturing’s revival in core economies continue to focus on
institutional and firm‐level factors, our conclusions suggest that more attention should be directed
to the less‐noticed yet profound effects of national macro‐economic and trade policies,
financialisation, and their interactions.
Manufacturing, Financialisation and Resource‐Based Economies
The literature on de‐industrialisation – the shift in a nation’s sectoral configuration away from
manufacturing – has focused on the experiences of advanced economies and an alleged inexorable
progression from manufacturing to services‐based activity. Various explanations view
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deindustrialisation as a consequence of: technological change (Pérez, 2002) and associated
rearrangements of the labour process (Bluestone and Harrison, 1982; Clark et al., 1986); falling
demand for locally produced manufactures as competition from producers in Asia intensifies (Singh,
1987); or the relocation of industrial activity to lower cost sites (Fröebel et al., 1980). Storper and
Walker (1989) combined these explanations in an account that stressed the inseparability of firms’
decisions about how, when and where commodities are produced. In recent times, geographies of
de‐industrialisation have emphasised local institutional and socio‐structural contexts, in particular
the capacities of durable and closely intertwined business and civic leadership networks to defend
manufacturing by capturing the interest of investors and politicians at the national and global scales
(Grabher and Stark, 1996; Christopherson and Clark, 2007; Safford, 2009; Bailey et al., 2010). In post‐
financial crisis Europe the emphasis has shifted from the causes of deindustrialisation to the agility
of regional responses to it (Hasslink and Shin, 2005, Dawley et al., 2010; Simmie and Martin, 2010).
Deindustrialisation is also associated with national policy change, such as occurred when the
United Kingdom adopted monetarist policies in the 1980s. Palma (2005) observed that in middle
income nations, especially in South America, deindustrialisation accompanies rapid policy shifts from
import substitution to export oriented industrialisation. In Chile, for example, the premature
removal of import substitution policies – before manufacturers were in a position be self‐sustaining
(Kaldor, 1967) – pushed the economy back to the primary production and resource extraction
activities in which it enjoyed a Ricardian comparative advantage (Palma, 2008).
These accounts generate an expectation that manufacturing’s decline is inevitable as
economies move up a staged developmental path where manufacturing wages rise and a services
dominated economic structure emerges (Rostow, 1961). Rowthorn and Wells (1987) observed that
manufacturing’s employment share declines when average incomes exceed a threshold of about
US$12,000 per annum. However, Palma (2005) demonstrated that this threshold value has been
falling over time and that the relationship between manufacturing employment and per capita
income differs for specialist manufacturing exporters (e.g. Japan) compared to countries pursuing an
industrialisation‐led growth agenda.
In resource‐rich economies there are additional forces at work. The experiences of the
Netherlands and the United Kingdom after the discovery of oil in the North Sea produced a new
form of deindustrialisation, now known as the Dutch disease, in which the rapid growth of exports in
one sector – say mining – pushes up exchange rates, crowds out factor markets and stifles domestic
manufacturing (Gregory, 1976; Corden and Neary, 1982). At the same time, higher real wages
generated by resources exports facilitate the growth of consumer services employment, further
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driving a shift away from manufacturing. The Dutch disease could result from a boom in any export
sector, including financial services (United Kingdom) or tourism (Greece), with deeper
deindustrialisation occurring where the discovery of new resources produces a rapid re‐allocation of
capital and labour among internal industry sectors (Palma, 2005). The related ‘resource curse thesis’
argues that an over‐reliance on resource extraction not only discourages other types of activity, such
as those requiring advanced skills, but also fosters the emergence of rentier states that rely on
resource taxes and potentially unhealthy partnerships with foreign multinational firms (van der
Ploeg, 2011).1 These different causes of deindustrialisation can operate cumulatively. However,
deindustrialisation is usually seen as problematic when it involves a decline in both output and
employment and when manufacturing job loss is not offset by employment growth in other sectors
(Anderson, 1999).
The Dutch disease and resource curse arguments recognise that manufacturing’s decline is
related directly to the position of national economies in global trading relationships – as expressed
by export income, exchange rates and terms of trade. Yet these arguments pre‐date the ascendancy
of monetarism, the opening of factor markets to global forces, and the penetration of the global
economy by financialisation (Zeller, 2008). Financialisation – being the “increasing role of financial
motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions” (Epstein, 2005:3) – produces
new challenges for manufacturing by creating powerful circuits of capital steered from core sites and
“designed only to make money” by trading predominantly in pre‐existing assets (Aalbers, 2008:150).
Drawing on O’Neill (2001), Pike (2006:206) links financialisation to deindustrialisation by showing
how the need for firms to deliver value to distant shareholders compromises regional interests. The
‘disembedding’ of economic activity from local interests, via new forms of distanciated ownership
and control, recreates the management of capital as “mediated and contested through specific and
particular configurations of spatialised social relations, social agency, and socio‐institutional context
over time, across space, and in place”. The macro‐economic processes undermining Australian
manufacturing as a whole are obviously more difficult to locate in specific social connections than
Pike is able to do for a single enterprise, but the direction is similar: when financialisation acts
through the re‐valuation of national currencies, it creates or destroys asset values, and value
creating activities (French et al. 2009, Martin, 2011). Moreover, these revaluations are often so
obtuse that actors are not aware of them, and are often observable only in the movements of
economic aggregates (see Weller, 2014). Financialisation alters the way that deindustrialisation
processes play out, as the Australian case in the years since the global financial crisis (2008‐2013)
demonstrates.
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Manufacturing in Australia
Understanding the recent crisis in manufacturing requires some knowledge of the distinctive
institutional arrangements in which Australia’s state and economy are intertwined. This section
establishes this context, by showing how manufacturing evolved as the product of “pre‐existing
resources, competences, skills and experiences inherited from previous local paths and patterns of
economic development” (Simmie and Martin, 2010: 6). The phases of development involved and
their legacies are summarised in Table 1. From Federation to the mid‐1980s assistance to
manufacturing was justified by employment security goals with industry policy primarily a
distributional rather than an accumulation strategy. After Australia adopted a liberalised market
framework in the mid‐1980s, however, manufacturing was expected to become internationally
competitive. But by the turn of the 21st century, local manufacturing was struggling against
competition from imports. The narrative below shows the cumulative impacts of this period.
Table 1 Australia’s Developmental Trajectory.
Development Phase Enduring Legacies for Manufacturing
Early Settlement (pre 1900) Dispersed space‐economy
Distance from core economies
Nation Building (1901‐1983) Protected industries, branch plants
Regulated labour market
Dearth of investment capital
Declining terms of trade
Global Integration (1984‐2000) Weak local inter‐firm linkages
Patchy national markets
Lack of global integration of firms
Issues of scale, firms too small to compete
Minerals Exporting, Financialisation (2000‐) Currency appreciation
Australia is a physically isolated island continent which in the nineteenth century operated
as a set of autonomous British colonies that supplied agricultural raw materials to support British
industrialisation. These circumstances produced a settlement pattern comprising large dispersed
port cities separated by vast distances. This configuration has persisted, with more than 70% of
Australians living in this handful of cities.
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Perhaps the critical moment in Australia’s political history was the nature of the Federation
formed in 1901. While the nation’s constitution overlayed a new Commonwealth onto six states, it
left them with defined and protected rights. Nation‐building thus required close attention to
national political and administrative formations across economic, political and social domains. The
main economic tools for the nation were trade protection, migration‐fuelled population growth and
centralised wage regulation, rather than direct industry intervention capacities. Fiscal equalisation
policies moderated state differences. These policies were supported on the grounds that they would
moderate dependency on an expanding agricultural sector facing decreasing returns and raise
manufacturing labour’s real wages, so producing higher and more sustainable levels of national
income (Brigden et al., 1929). The adoption of Keynesianism from the mid‐1930s powered‐up the
nation’s pursuit of an autonomous growth path and the goal of full employment. By the 1960s,
Australia had become a “wage earners’ welfare state” with full employment, relatively high wages,
low wage variability and universal welfare provision (Castles, 1989).
Under protective trade policies, the manufacturing sector employed over 25% of the
national workforce throughout the 1960s. However, manufacturing enterprises were typically
owned by British interests. These plants remained small, with a narrow range of outputs and low
productivity. They were not expected to compete with British exports (see Webber and Weller,
2001). In the resulting spatially‐dispersed branch plant economy, intra‐industry interactions and
local agglomerative synergies were weak (Plummer and Taylor, 2001).2 The nation’s development
remained uneven, with the most populous states (New South Wales, Victoria) and Adelaide‐centric
South Australia industrialising under import‐substitution policies while the sparsely populated states
(Western Australia, Queensland, Tasmania) continued to rely on agriculture and resources
industries.
By the mid‐1970s, the strategy had become unsustainable. The economy remained heavily
reliant on external income from commodity exports and vulnerable to a long term decline of its
terms of trade as world agricultural surpluses grew (see Prebisch, 1950). Moreover, as
manufacturing activity in Asia expanded, tariff protection, even at raised levels, failed to maintain
local manufacturing’s market share. Employment in manufacturing had begun to decline. By the late
1960s, with inflation becoming an intractable problem and terms of trade in continued decline,
policy makers became convinced that the import substitution strategy was no longer effective
(Rattigan, 1986). The Whitlam Labor government (1972‐75) was forced to devalue the Australian
dollar and cut protection in 1974, resulting in a torrent of manufacturing job shedding. Arguments in
favour of opening the economy’s product and financial markets gained political traction.
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After a prolonged debate, the accumulation strategy shifted with the election of the Hawke
Labor government in 1983. Trade liberalisation, financial deregulation, openness to foreign
investment and competitive, and market oriented domestic policies were embraced. The new
orientation began with floating of the Australian dollar. Restrictions on international capital flows
were relaxed to open up Australia’s then “small and underdeveloped” foreign exchange market
(Stevens, 2013). The float of the dollar, combined with the decision to issue government debt at
tender, mobilised monetary policies that were already familiar in other places (Stevens, 2013). The
immediate effect was a fall in domestic interest rate volatility and domestic inflation but at the cost
of increased exchange rate volatility. The development of hedge markets made it possible for firms
to manage short‐term exchange rate movements. The exchange rate, then about US$0.90, settled to
a lower level; around US$0.80 in the early 1990s. The lower exchange rate made local exporters
more competitive in world markets.
The policy shift was accompanied by a corporatist accord between government, business
and labour.3 Industry policy took inspiration from the social democratic models popular in
Scandinavia and looked to revitalising the manufacturing sector and reforming the labour market,
but without abolishing wage regulation or retrenching welfare services. Australia’s trade
liberalisation agenda was justified by arguments about the need to build on comparative advantages
in agricultural production and resource extraction (Garnaut, 1990). But with external trade policies
accepting the logics of factor‐price based comparative advantage – in which Australia’s abundant
factor is land (Samuelson, 1948) – and internal industry policies advocating interventionist state
action to create competitive advantages and increasing returns (after Porter, 1980; Romer, 1986),
the policy directions were tensely juxtaposed, if not contradictory (Thurborn, 2012). Certainly there
was agreement that capital and skills invested in ‘old’ manufacturing specialisations were inhibiting
the emergence of a new economy in advanced manufacturing and services. In practice, the new
settings favoured exporting industries – agriculture and mining – while compromising trade‐exposed
manufacturing industries. Import penetration rose rapidly. In this phase, therefore,
deindustrialisation was closely associated with macro‐policy changes.
Significant manufacturing job loss during the 1990‐91 recession prompted more
interventionist policies. The objectives of industry policy in this period continued to be framed
nationally. The objects were to encourage the upgrade of manufacturing plants by lifting their
productivity, flexibility and international competitiveness, enhance the efficiency of national product
markets, improve the economies of scale of local manufacturers, and grow export markets. The
ensuing restructuring – complemented by technological change – sought to replace the production
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models of the pre‐1970s with leaner, flexible and technologically advanced production systems.
Local manufacturers were enticed by narratives of the ‘knowledge economy’ to develop advanced
manufactures and exploit niche markets, taking advantage of productivity gains enabled by the
accord’s class settlement between capital and labour. Lower tariffs delivered supply chain savings,
with outsourcing and vertical disintegration blurring the divisions between manufacturing and
services. While manufacturing was still losing employment share, output and productivity in this
period improved immeasurably.4 In the late 1990s, as the declining value of the Australian dollar
improved their position relative to imported commodities, local manufacturers were optimistic that
they could prosper in a globalised economy.
Manufacturing’s share of merchandise exports peaked at 12.3% in the early 2000s, at a time
when the Australian dollar bottomed at US$0.49 (ABS, 2014b), and before World Trade Organisation
agreements mitigated the export subsidies that had supported the revitalisation (see Weller, 2006).
Even then, imported manufactures increased their local market share with many local firms
struggling to against large‐scale global producers with their prominent brands. Policies nurturing
national markets generated large oligopolistic retailers, but these sourced products offshore from
firms with pre‐existing capacities to meet high volume orders rather than from local manufacturers
challenged by vast distances between urban centres.5 Global firms acquired domestically‐held
national brands, discontinued local production, and then re‐branded imported products. In contrast
to manufacturing in other high wage economies, few Australian firms were large enough to establish
off‐shore production networks (Weller, 2006). Meanwhile, although Australia had opened its
economy to world markets, its ostensibly liberal trading partners reciprocated insufficiently. 6 The
high costs of accessing distant world markets also dampened local firms’ export ambitions.
Responding to these challenges, trade and industry policy shifted after 2001 under a Howard
Coalition government. The Coalition pursued bilateral rather than global free trade agreements (for
example, with the United States and Thailand), but these also proved to be detrimental to Australian
manufacturing generally and to the automotive sector in particular (see Weiss et al., 2004).
Following global trends, industry policy refocused on innovation, knowledge, inter‐firm networking
and cluster development to stimulate endogenous growth. Government incentives encouraged local
firms to integrate with global production networks, but Australia’s peripheral location, regulated
economy and high production costs militated against the success of this strategy.7
Throughout this general period of market liberalisation and internal reform,
deindustrialisation persisted in a context of technological changes and policy settings that were
inhospitable to local manufacturing. Australian manufacturing production shifted gradually to less
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trade‐exposed products: either because their material nature made them difficult to transport; or
because they better matched Australian tastes or regulations. There was also a shift to higher value,
technologically sophisticated niche products, especially in the cultural industries (Gibson et al.,
2012), although production volumes were small and nearby New Zealand – which has a common
product market arrangement with Australia – had cost advantages over Australian production in this
domain (Weller, 2014).
The liberalisation process had uneven outcomes, delivering wealth and employment growth
to globally linked cities like Sydney but producing challenges in manufacturing and industrial regions
like Newcastle, Wollongong, Geelong, Adelaide and the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne
(Fagan, 2000). Although the idea of a ‘national economy’ was continually reinforced by national
discourses, as well as by a Keynesian system of national accounts (Bryan, 2001), the economic
fortunes of Australia’s diverse regions were becoming more differentiated.
Resources and Financialisation
Since 2000, Australia’s position in the world economy has changed. Manufacturing decline has
continued, but now with new causes. This new phase tracked an appreciating Australian dollar as
Australia’s mining industry expanded to meet East Asian demand for raw materials. An appreciating
currency reduces the competitiveness of local manufacturing relative to imports. As shown in Figure
1, the growth in Australia’s minerals exports accelerated between 2003 and 2012. As mining
expanded, manufacturing’s share of Australia’s merchandise exports slumped in value terms, to
merely 5.5% of exports in 2013. Manufacturing employment also contracted, falling to about 8% of
all jobs (ABS, 2013).
11
Figure 1 Merchandise exports by broad industry category, 1988 – 2013.
Source: ABS (2014).
This sectoral shift might be interpreted as a case of the Dutch disease.8 But that conclusion
depends on whether the resources boom has crowded out other sectors. A different interpretation
involves the effects of the appreciation of Australia’s currency in the context of shifts in the terms of
trade. In the textbook case of the Dutch disease, the manufacturing sector contracts as capital and
labour are drawn into an expanding economic sector, in this case, mining. Yet in Australia’s recent
experience, capital flooding into extraction activities is drawn predominantly from offshore, often in
deals packaged in Sydney’s financial sector. Much of the mining sector’s labour is also drawn from
overseas. NIEIR (2011), for example, found that three quarters of jobs created by the mining boom
were filled by new immigrants, although NIEIR also observes some crowding out in the skilled trades,
with workers from the non‐mining states commuting to Queensland and Western Australia.9
Moreover, much of the surplus value created by the mining industry either accrues off‐shore or is
invested offshore. Sheehan and Gregory (2013) estimate that when new mining projects are fully
operational, 35% of their profits are payable to offshore investors. Manufacturing’s recent decline,
therefore, seems insufficiently explainable by the crowding out of nationally‐bound factor markets,
as the Dutch disease argument suggests.
Instead, the contraction of manufacturing involves a complex series of events and processes.
Certainly, accelerated East Asian demand for resources exports has inflated export prices, injecting
new income into the economy. So too, the resources boom has stimulated inward capital flows,
especially foreign direct investment in mines and related projects. Nationally, real gross domestic
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income grew by 29.6% in the years 2003‐2012, with 13% of that gain attributable to improving terms
of trade (Sheehan and Gregory, 2013).10 Indeed, income generated from mining activity has been
more than sufficient to balance, at least in accounting terms, the effects of payments for imported
commodities, dividends paid overseas, and direct offshore investment. Rising East Asian productivity
also meant that real prices of imported manufactured goods have fallen at the same time as the
purchasing power of the Australian dollar has risen, meaning significant advances in domestic
standards of living. Increased household wealth has been diverted to debt payments and expanded
superannuation saving and personal investment (RBA, 2009). Then, and most importantly for the
fate of manufacturing, capital inflows have contributed to currency appreciation relative to most
advanced economies. This period of rapid and largely unplanned growth at a time of economic
stagnation in comparable economies has made Australia an “outlier … in the historical record”
(Sheehan and Gregory, 2013:122). Moreover, this added wealth, combined with robust financial
regulation and timely fiscal intervention, has enabled the Australian economy to avoid the
recessionary effects of the global financial crisis.
These complex interplays could be expected in an open economy. In the economic theory
that guided Australia’s switch to an open‐market accumulation strategy, exchange rate movements
cushion the negative effects of shifts in the terms of trade (Gruen and Kortian, 1996). A floating
exchange rate mollifies the effects of terms of trade fluctuations such as by dampening the
inflationary pressures of increased export earnings (Henry, 2008; Garton et al., 2012). As Figure 2
shows, the Australian government’s measures for these movements ‐ the terms of trade and the
trade weighted index – tracked each other in the period from just after the float in 1983 to 2007.
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Figure 2 The Terms of Trade and Trade Weighted Index, 1970–2013.
Source: ABS (2014) and RBA (2014).
Note: The trade‐weighted index (TWI) is a measure of the value of the Australian dollar relative to
trading partners and is designed to reflect the composition of Australia's merchandise trade;
the base is 100 in 1970. The terms of trade (TOT) is a measure of the ratio of exports to
imports; technically the export implicit price deflator divided by the import implicit price
deflator and then multiplied by 100.
However, the two measures break step around the time of the global financial crisis with a
pronounced difference in their paths by 2011. The exchange rate appreciated more than expected
after 2007, with an extraordinary 31% real increase in the value of the AUD in the period from 2003
to 2012. The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) concedes that the AUD was overvalued in this period
(Stevens, 2013), with currency overvaluation adversely impacting local exporters but advantaging
local importers (such as retailers).
The over‐valuation of the Australian dollar and the apparent failure of the trade‐currency
adjustment mechanism arose in part from the effects of accelerated capital movements.11 Quite
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remarkably, in 2012, the average daily value of Australia‐United States currency swaps was US$186
billion, making the US‐AUD pair the fourth most traded currency on world markets (Toohey, 2013).
Most of this trading activity has occurred outside the Australia’s banking jurisdiction; in global
financial centres especially London.12 The high trading volumes arise because of the quality of
Australian‐dollar denominated financial products, including the currency itself, and therefore the
high demand for these in the conduct of hedging and arbitrage investment globally. Such trading
generates flows that disrupt the text‐book relationships between current account positions,
currency values and capital flows (Bryan, 2001). The Australian currency is also attractive to traders
and investors because of its sensitivity to commodity price fluctuations, reflecting Australia’s
reliance on primary export industries (Gruen and Kortian, 1996). A further influence flows directly
from the global financial crisis, with low interest rate and ‘quantitative easing’ settings in the United
States and other economies as a component of their stimulus policies inducing capital to seek out
higher yield interest rate products in the relatively secure, yet still highly liquid Australian dollar
environment (Stevens, 2013).13 A surprise for many has been the length of time this Australian
advantage has persisted. For manufacturing, the period has been too long.
To sum up, the Australian currency has maintained an overvalued position, not only due to
the resources boom but also as a result of heightened trading in currency and Australian dollar‐
denominated financial product, a direct effect of the stimulus policies that other countries have
implemented to deal with the financial crisis. This has had a devastating effect on manufacturing
industry, as the next section explains.
A Country that Makes Things?
Overall, Australian manufacturing continues to experience decline in both employment and output.
Figure 3 tracks the decline of full‐time manufacturing employment against shifts in the value of the
Australian currency. It shows the steep fall in manufacturing employment in the 1990‐91 recession,
followed by a period of stability as the sector upgraded in the 1990s. Then we can see falling fulltime
manufacturing employment after 2000 as the Australian dollar appreciates. The rate of decline
increases after 2007 as the Australian currency overheats.
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Figure 3 Manufacturing Employment and Trade Weighted Index, 1984–2013.
Source: ABS (2013, 2014).
Not shown on the graph is the sharp contraction in manufacturing employment since 2012,
following multiple plant closures. Some of these, particularly those in the automotive sector, are a
consequence of the ‘reshoring’ policies of US transnationals; policies that in turn have been made
possible by policies that suppress the US currency’s value (see Bergsten and Gagnon, 2012). A spate
of closures in 2014 confirms that transnational firms have acted on an understanding that the higher
value of the Australian currency has been more than short‐term fluctuation.
In short, we can observe that the mining boom has coincided with what is described as a
‘two speed’ (Garton, 2008), ‘three‐speed’ (Corden, 2012) or even ‘multi‐speed’ economy (Spence,
2011). New mining and mining‐related jobs are concentrating in the states of Western Australia and
Queensland, finance sector jobs (also mining fuelled) are concentrating in Sydney, while the ‘lagging’
portions of the economy increasingly depend on population‐driven formulas for provision of
government‐supported health, education and community sector employment. Many such places
appear destined to longer‐term decline. Wages growth has also been uneven, with strong gains in
the mining, mining‐related and finance sectors, but slower growth in manufacturing, parts of
agriculture, tourism and some services, especially education. Employment growth is now insufficient
to stem rising job loss or to maintain labour force participation rates.
Without confidence that manufacturing could ever be internationally competitive (OECD
2010; AFR, 2013), political support for the manufacturing sector has waned. Direct government
industry policy support was wound back from about A$6 billion per annum in 2006‐07 to a little
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Trade Weighted Index
Fulltime Manufacturing
Employment
Nov-12Nov-08Nov-04Nov-00Nov-96Nov-92Nov-88Nov-84
Full
tim
e M
an
ufa
ctu
rin
g E
mp
loy
me
nt
Tra
de
We
igh
ted
In
de
x
16
more than A$5.5 billion per annum in 2011‐12. However, recognising the ‘multi‐speed’ economy is
out of balance, there is debate about whether the Reserve Bank of Australia possesses the capacity
to correct the AUD’s inflated value (Parkinson 2011; Corden, 2012; Stevens, 2013). The issue is
whether the various ‘non‐discriminatory’ monetary policy instruments that been used in other
jurisdictions to manage the financial crisis – including interest rate settings, taxes and regulations on
currency movements, resources rent taxes, and direct intervention through sovereign wealth funds
– are available in Australia. After reviewing the options, Corden (2012) concludes that it is not
feasible to apply these instruments in a resource‐dependent, branch plant economy characterised
by overseas ownership and capital mobility. Parkinson (2011) also rejects intervention; he
anticipates that the Australian dollar will retain its high value – either because it has become
entrenched as a mediating position for financial traders or because the expanded mining sector has
permanently restructured the economy – and concludes that if mining continues to deliver high
incomes that enable consumers to purchase imports relatively easily, the case for retaining
manufacturing is weak. After reviewing the options, the RBA governor concludes that intervention
would be too expensive and carry too much risk (Stevens, 2013). In any case, Stevens argues, an
open financial sector will in the long run ensure that Australia’s costs are not “out of step” with
global forces. There seems no available policy‐based means of deflating the currency to return local
manufacturing to a competitive position.
Within the manufacturing sector, the impacts of the high dollar value have been uneven.
Figure 4 shows that the previously highly protected sub‐sectors that compete directly with large
global supply networks – such as textiles, clothing and fabricated metals – have experienced the
largest declines. Manufacturing sub‐sectors that process local primary inputs mainly for the local
market – food, beverage and tobacco, primary metals and petroleum and coal products – grew in
the years 2001 to 2011. Since 2001, manufacturing has become more closely linked materially and
spatially to primary production, especially to mining.14 Growth in employment in primary metals and
‘undefined’ manufacturing offsets substantial losses in the other sectors to some extent. Mining
related manufacturing employment is concentrating in Western Australia, while the job losses in
other sub‐sectors are most notable in the eastern states.
17
Figure 4 Full‐time employment change, manufacturing subdivisions, 1991–2011.
Source: ABS (2013).
The loss of manufacturing capacity is obviously a problem for workers who lose their jobs (Weller
and Webber, 1999), but whether it is a problem for Australia’s developmental trajectory depends on
how economic growth processes are understood and on what the objective of economic activity is
taken to be. For some, the idea that manufacturing and manufacturing employment should be
‘saved’ can be attributed to nostalgia for the (Fordist) past; a nostalgia that forgets the drudgery of
many manufacturing tasks. But there is more at stake. Two opposing views of the value of
manufacturing now map onto the policy orientations of Australia’s main political parties.
A Kaldorian (1978) perspective informs the Labor movement’s position (AWU, 2009). It
views manufacturing as crucial to economic growth, skills development, and to achieving the
sectoral structure that underpins the resilience of a demand‐driven regional economy (see Thirlwall,
1980). Here the optimal sectoral configuration would maintain growth and employment
opportunities, while not necessarily maximising the aggregate growth rate. Manufacturing is valued
on the grounds that it provides opportunities to develop the technology, innovation and productivity
improvement that drives growth, and because its forward and backward linkages transmit
exceptional multiplier effects across other sectors and regions (Hirschman, 1958). This argument
-60.0
-40.0
-20.0
0.0
20.0
40.0
60.0Change 1991-2001
Change 2001-2011
Textiles,
Clothing.
Footwear
Leather
Transport
Equipment
Fabricated
Metals
Other Print
& MediaPolymer
& Rubber
Pulp &
Paper
Machinery
Chemicals
Wood
Products
Non-Metallic
Minerals
Petroleum
& Coal
Prods
Beverages
& Tobacco
Food Primary
Metals
Not
Defined
18
justifies continued support for manufacturing, even in an adverse macro‐economic context (Sicklen,
1998). Practically, plant closures destroy the value of physical assets that have been upgraded over
the last twenty years via the contribution of taxpayers through government incentives and tax
concessions. Moreover, it may well be cheaper to subsidise manufacturers than to support
unemployed workers, given weak employment growth and the difficulties facing displaced
manufacturing workers in finding jobs in a segmented, services oriented labour market. This returns
the argument to Bridgen et al.’s (1929) position, in which the principal purpose of government
support for manufacturing is to maintain employment. There is also a strategic consideration: the
overvalued dollar compromises manufacturing, but plants that close down are unlikely to reopen
when the value of the dollar returns to a more reasonable level for manufacturers. It could be seen
as astute to support firms through the crisis, like many governments have done during the global
financial crisis. The then Labor government’s proposed ‘co‐investments’ in 2012 to shore up the
viability of vulnerable manufacturers could be seen in this light.
Yet there are doubts that such an approach would succeed. We have shown how supporting
manufacturing with industry policy instruments within a contradictory macroeconomic framework
has a high risk of failure. Then there is the question of whether manufacturing is a necessary
component of an advanced and prosperous economy. Technologically‐advanced industries like
agriculture and mining have also demonstrated the potential to drive downstream developments in
a manner similar to manufacturing (Ville and Wicken, 2014; Sæther et al., 2011). Norway’s success in
developing industries that leverage from resources activity, and Finland’s success with mobile
telecommunications manufacturing are examples of less linear pathways. In Australia, however,
building resource‐related manufacturing industries would require major changes in the ways that
overseas‐owned mining companies source their inputs. The point is that manufacturing is not the
only means of driving innovation and growth.
The alternative view – and the view of the Australian policy elite – is that manufacturing
activity has no intrinsic value, that the economy’s sectoral configuration is and should be the
outcome of market processes, and policy interventions produce more problems than remedies.
Under liberalised market oriented policies, where it is believed that capital seeks out the most
profitable sites, sectoral and regional employment outcomes are those that maximise the extraction
of surplus value (although the question of ‘for whom’ is not asked). By this logic, it is nonsensical to
argue that the value of the Australian dollar is too high: its price is always correct. In 2013, following
this reasoning, the incoming Abbott‐led Coalition government made it clear that it would not
subsidise unprofitable firms.
19
Evaluating the merits of pro‐manufacturing interventions also requires an understanding of
manufacturing’s role in industrial transformation. If the emergence of new industries occurs at the
expense of less competitive ones – in the zero‐sum exchange anticipated by structural adjustment
theories – then the support of ‘old economy’ manufacturing specialisations inhibits the emergence
of ‘new economy’ jobs in advanced manufacturing and services. The decline of old specialisations
becomes both necessary and desirable to free resources for better uses. On the other hand, if new
specialisations emerge from the old, in a path‐dependent process following a ‘related variety’
paradigm, then retaining current capacity and skills is crucial to the viability not only of
manufacturing, but of as‐yet‐undefined activities that will rely on pre‐existing knowledge and skills.
Australia’s debate about whether or not the nation should continue to ‘make things’ (AWU, 2009)
continually revisits these competing viewpoints. The problem is that neither view has enough
traction in the Australian context to win out: zero‐sum creative destruction encourages the exit of
overseas based firms, but Kaldorian innovation fails without the agglomerative synergies of dense
industrial activity.
Perhaps, though, when we analyse manufacturing we ask the wrong question. If the
question – as in Brigden’s time – is revised to “How best could we improve the prosperity and
wellbeing of citizens?” then the answer would not necessarily rest on whether Australian
manufacturing is internationally competitive. Historically, as we note above, manufacturing
protection served as a means to redistribute the wealth created by resource industries, to and
among the urban population. The problem of generating sufficient quality urban employment has
not gone away. The further loss of manufacturing jobs seems likely to entrench high unemployment
in regional areas and in the manufacturing belts of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, and to retard
technical skills development. The rhetoric of ‘positive deindustrialisation’ holds up the promise that
creative, knowledge intensive services employment will replace the jobs lost in manufacturing, but
these knowledge‐rich jobs are in relatively short supply. Moreover, the issues that have impeded the
development of manufacturing – a small and fragmented economy isolated from global production
networks – are also likely to impede the further development of new economy sectors.
Conclusion
To conclude, we reiterate three points. First, we have stressed the importance of understanding the
fortunes of manufacturing from a political economy perspective, taking seriously the specificities of
context in relation to both the position of the national economy in global flows and the sectoral
composition arising from an established developmental trajectory. In the absence of context, it is
not possible to adjudicate on whether the loss of manufacturing activity matters; whether
20
manufacturing jobs are being replaced by more knowledge intensive jobs; or whether manufacturing
capital is shifting to more profitable sectors. Second, we have shown that in Australia the fortunes of
manufacturing firms are shaped by macroeconomic conditions. In fact, in the Australian story of
manufacturing decline the effects of exchange rate fluctuations dwarf the impacts of both firm and
inter‐firm scale, technical or organisational changes, and industry interventions. It seems odd that,
globally, economic geographies of manufacturing emphasise firm and inter‐firm relationships when
we see macroeconomic issues as so crucially important. Even in work where financialisation
processes are considered as a driver of deindustrialisation, the emphasis remains locked on the firm
scale and the processes of extracting value for shareholders (Pike, 2006), rather than the wider
national context. But perhaps geographers in core locations in the global north are less likely to
notice macroeconomic issues. When firms are locally owned and valued, national macroeconomic
settings and national business strategies become complementary; whereas in peripheral regions,
where firms are overseas‐owned price‐takers, they are contradictory. Third, the Australian example
highlights the role of financialisation in the decline of manufacturing, demonstrating again the
geographically uneven effects of financialisation as “national borders … function as the portals
through which monetary fluctuations, perturbations and shocks originating elsewhere are
transmitted down through their domestic financial systems and economies, with highly
geographically differentiated effects”(Garretsen et al., 2009:144; after Tobin, 1984). Financial crisis
has been exported to Australia via global trading in currency and Australian dollar‐denominated
financial products, but the resource‐based nature of the Australian economy prevents the
deployment of the macro‐economic remedial actions that are available elsewhere. The lesson for
economic geography is that the specificities produced by history and geography and policy
incongruities are important. For these reasons, it is crucial that analyses of manufacturing
regeneration in advanced economies consider the extent to which macroeconomic structural stimuli
support or negate potential gains from the practices of actors at the scales of firms and inter‐firm
networks.
Acknowledgments
We thank the editors and the reviewers for their helpful and sympathetic comments. The research
underpinning this paper was supported by the Australian Research Council (projects FT110100854
and DP130104319).
Endnotes
21
1 This is a ‘curse’ because it leads to legitimacy crises if states under‐invest in their domestic constituencies. 2 Australian ownership in the manufacturing sector was largely confined to smelting, as mandated by state governments in return for mining licences. The involvement of BHP Ltd in iron and steel making, and CSR Ltd in aluminium smelting, are examples. 3 Hall and Soskice (2001) classified Australia in the 1990s as a liberal market economy similar to the United States and United Kingdom; but this is not accurate, as Australia’s reformist governments retained effective regulation of labour markets, financial services and welfare provision (Weller and O’Neill, 2014). 4 A cautionary note here: the range of activities assigned to ‘manufacturing’ by the Australia Bureau of Statistics evolved beyond a relatively narrow definition used in 1983. 5 The fragmented, small domestic market also made it difficult for local firms to expand product ranges to compete with imports. 6 Cars imported into Australia face low tariffs (of 0‐5%), but Australian carmakers exporting to automotive‐source countries continue to face high import tariffs. For example, China imposes a car tariff of 25%, plus 18% VAT (FAPM, 2012). 7 Australia’s manufacturing productivity is about 60% of the US rate, due mainly to differences in capital intensity and scale (Young et al., 2008), yet Australian manufacturing workers earn US$10 per hour more than comparable workers in the United States. Distance and transport costs explain as much as 10% of Australia’s lower productivity compared to other OECD countries (OECD, 2008; see Battersby 2006; Dolman et al., 2007). 8 Australia’s short‐lived resources boom during the Korean War had crystallised concerns about its dangers and spawned the ‘dependent economy’ model of internationalisation, in which floating exchange rates and capital mobility would allow the relative prices of domestic and internationally traded goods to adjust to each other and represent the ‘real’ exchange rate (Swan, 1960, Dornbusch, 1980). 9 Of a net increase of 171,000 full time jobs nationally between 2007 and 2012, 186,000 jobs were filled by new migrants (ABS, 2013). 10 Real gross domestic income (GDI) is real GDP plus the trading gain arising from the increase in the terms of trade. The measure ‘real GDP’ does not account for income relating to changes in export prices. 11 Still, Corden (2012) attributes most of the exchange rate appreciation to the mining boom rather than to currency speculation. 12 The Australian foreign exchange market is now the 7th largest in the world in terms of global turnover, while the Australian dollar is the 5th most traded currency and the AUD/USD the 4th most traded currency pair. 13 Stevens (2013) suggests that the low interest rates in core economies since the GFC demonstrate that they have reached the limits of monetary policy. The Australian economy has not yet reached that point and Australian policymakers retain the option of using interest rates to manage the macro‐economy. 14 Gruen (2011) estimated that although mining’s direct share of Australia’s economic activity is about 7% to 8%, mining accounts for as much as 20% of all activity after mining‐related manufacturing, construction and services are included.
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