The impact of a customs union: the lessons of intra-Australian trade matrices before and after Federation

Crawford School of Public Policy | Arndt-Corden Department of Economics

Event details

ACDE Seminar

Date & time

Tuesday 24 October 2017
2.00pm–3.30pm

Venue

Coombs Seminar Room C, Coombs Building, Fellows Road, ANU

Speaker

William Coleman, ANU.

The impacts on Australia’s trade relations of the creation in 1901 of a customs union of the Australian states has yet to be extensively investigated. This paper serves a wider investigation of this topic by undertaking a key piece of groundwork: it prepares matrices of trade flows between each of the Australian states—and between each state and abroad—for each year from the late 1890s to 1910. A variety of normalisations of the matrix entries are conducted which assist in drawing inferences from the data. The relatively inductive method proves suggestive of a range of (consistent) hypotheses regarding the impact of Federation in fostering intra-Australian trade, and in inhibiting Australian international trade.

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