It seems you have to be from outside Australia to understand the macro forces acting upon its economy. From Barclays comes a fascinating and sobering report about the “victims” of Dutch Disease:
Barclays’s foreign exchange research team found that Australia, Canada, Norway, and New Zealand have been victims of a “Dutch Disease pandemic during the recent commodity boom”:
Dutch Disease refers to the process by which an increase in commodity prices exerts upward pressure on the currency of a nation that exports that natural resource, and causes a decline in the country’s manufacturing sector, which loses competitiveness as the exchange rate rises.
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