[LINK] 2009 Australian ICT Trade Update

[Tom Worthington]

The Australian Computer Society released its 2009 Australian ICT Trade
Update on 22 September 2009. This is really for 2008 and shows a ICT
trade deficit of $28b for that year. It is not all bad news with
Australian ICT exports being $6.6b, 2.3% of the total Australian
Exports. There is a one page summary "2009 Australian Trade Update"
<http://www.acs.org.au/news/220909.htm> as well as the full 96 page
"2009 Australian ICT Trade Update" (2.2 Mbytes of PDF)
<https://www.acs.org.au/09icttradeupdate/ict_trade_update.pdf>.

This, as well as statistics for the NBN, got discussed at
the ICT Statistics Reference Group Meeting at the Australian Bureau of
Statistics in Canberra yesterday:
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2009/09/ict-statistics-for-national-broadband.html>.

Professor John Houghton has done his usual thorough analysis for his
ICT Trade report for the ACS. Unfortunately the news has not changed over
the years this report has been done: ICT still holds promise for the
Australian economy. It would be interesting to see what the figures were
if ICT education was included, with Australia's large intake of overseas
students studying computing (I am contributing to exports by educating
international students in Australian and other overseas via the Internet).

Unfortunately, as with previous reports, the material is published as a
poorly formatted, difficult to read PDF document. This makes it very
much harder to disseminate the information and must be resulting in much
of the impact of work being lost. The summary document suffers from this
problem with a lesser extent, with the table of figures not being
correctly marked up in HTML for web display.

 From the Summary:

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Key Import And Export Trends
     Exports

         * ICT goods and services are amongst the top ten principle
exports for Australia - accounting for around 2.3% of Australia’s total
export earnings.
         * The largest markets for Australian ICT equipment exports are
New Zealand, USA, China, Germany and Singapore.
         * The largest recorded markets for ICT services are USA, Hong
Kong, UK, New Zealand, Singapore and Japan. China (incl. SARs) is also a
major market.
         * Computer and information services exports are the biggest
category of exports for Australia, having increased three fold in the
last decade. Major markets are the US, UK and New Zealand.


     Imports

         * Imports of ICT goods and services accounted for around 13% of
Australia’s total import debits.
         * Largest ICT equipment import sources are China, USA,
Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Germany.
         * Largest ICT services import sources are USA, UK, India,
Germany, New Zealand Hong Kong and Singapore. ...

     From: "2009 Australian Trade Update", Media Release, Australian
Computer Society released its 2009 Australian ICT Trade Update on 22
September 2009 <http://www.acs.org.au/news/220909.htm>
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-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/people.php?StaffID=140274