CANBERRA, March 7 (Xinhua) -- Australia's economy is too reliant on exports of a narrow range of products, the opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP) warned on Wednesday.
In a speech to the Insurance Council of Australia on Wednesday, Shadow Assistant Treasury Andrew Leigh warned that Australian exports were "simple" compared to other advanced economies.
He said that a nation's economic complexity, a rating in which Australia ranks "badly" according to the Harvard Atlas of Complexity, is a good predictor of future economic growth.
"We need to encourage a wider variety of export industries," Leigh said.
"Out of 122 economies that the experts have assessed, we come 65th, just below halfway.
"For a nation that consistently ranks among the top 20 for our income per person, this is an astonishingly poor performance."
The Harvard Complexity Atlas, compiled by a team led by economic expert Ricardo Hausmann, found that around 60 percent of Australia's 217 billion U.S. dollars of exports were in the form of minerals.
By comparison, the largest export category for Japan, which the index ranked as having the most complex economy in the world, was automobiles at approximately 20 percent of total exports.
"Over the longer run, Hausmann and his colleagues estimate that Australia's economic complexity ranking stayed pretty constant from the mid-1960s to the late-1970s, then fell markedly over the past generation," Leigh said.
"On their measures, we have never been an especially complex economy. But we've gotten a lot 'simpler' in recent years."
