Melbourne: Australia is the smallest continent on planet earth and the sixth largest country in the world. It has a population of around 20 million scattered mainly along the coastal lines of east, west and south.

Sydney, the capital of New South Wales State, is the commercial capital of Australia. On par with Sydney is Melbourne, which is an internationally reputed city with its own heritage, culture, style of living, fashion and major sporting events.

Other major cities are Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin and Alice Springs. These cities have got its own essence of lifestyle and importance on its own. But one could think and ask oneself, which is the national capital of Australia.

The capital city of Australia is neither Sydney nor Melbourne, but a beautiful, well-designed and manmade city called Canberra. Canberra is located between Melbourne and Sydney. It is the lace where heads of state, major government dignitaries, diplomats and their offices are situated. (Source for statistical figures: )

Australia is considered to be one of the developed nations in the world. It has plenty of natural resources in the form of iron, copper, zinc, natural gas, petroleum etc. Predominantly, it is an economy concentrated on agriculture, mining and manufacturing sectors. For the past century, we observed the metamorphic shift in the nature and function of developed economies like the US, the UK and Japan. These developed and developing economies have evolved from different ages of revolution from agriculture and industry to the current phenomenon of information age.

The general feeling or trend is: Technology shift never ends. New technologies, products, services and modernisation of this planet are a continuous and evergreen process. Likewise, economics two major market forces demand and supply are constantly varying. These two indispensable forces are controlled by consumers and producers, respectively. If these forces do not exist, then there is no meaning or existence of the term market.

As we are in the digital age, phrased by several business writers, the conditions of the current global economic situation is in a recessionary state. Due to international disasters and unexpected events happening in our daily lives, to maintain and sustain an economy is a challenging task for governments and the corporate world.

In spite of this, the Australian economy sustained quite well, while other major economies like the US and Japan are facing recession. This is probably because major sectors of the Australian economy that contribute to the GDP are predominantly engaged in manufacturing, mining, banking and telecommunications.

Trends about Australian corporations in the global business scene
The corporate world is well aware of the concept of Global 1,000 corporations for ranking the largest corporations in the world. In the recent Business Week survey of Global 1,000 corporations, the results provided a list of the major corporations in every country ranked in the first 1,000 global corporations.

The ranking is done on the basis of several business indicators, such as market capitalisation, revenue sales, revenue growth, return on equity, shareholder return and profits. (Source: Business week issue, 15 July 2002). Among these Global 1,000, there are 19 Australian-owned corporations.

These 19 corporations primarily belong to the sectors of banking, retailing, manufacturing and telecommunications. To name a few are National Australia Bank, ANZ Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Woolworth, Coles Myer and BHP. This valuable statistic is again an expression of the dependence of Australian economy in the non-core IT sector. (Source: Business week issue, 15 July 2002)

Another statistical debate is about the recent rankings released by Business Week for top 200 IT corporations in the world. In this list, there is only one and only corporation from Australia Telstra. This corporation is ranked 18^th in the list. The survey variables for preparing the list are in terms of the biggest, fastest-growing, most profitable and best returns for companies in the IT sector. (Source: Data provided by standard and poor for Business Week, cited in the )

Telstra, primarily a telecommunications company, is the national carrier for communication in Australia. As the nature and characteristics of IT and telecommunication sectors are mutually inter-linked and dependent, Telstras diversified strategies enabled them to enter the IT industry in Australia in a big way and gained economies of scale due to its huge nationwide network and infrastructure capabilities. In an outset, the number of Australian-owned corporations in the IT sector is very minimal in ratio when compared to the US or Japan or further economies like the UK or Germany.

One of the key reasons in the downturn of major global economies was due to the slump of IT sector in the global economic climate. As we know, the US is a country where the IT boom took off to great heights and the effects were seen in the countrys stock market. The economy of Australia was resilient and robust during this boom period and even after the slump as well. As explained earlier, the general nature of Australian economy relying on manufacturing sectors helped to survive in the current global economic downturn and sustained growth rate in GDP.

The main trading partner of Australia is Japan. For the last few years, the Japanese economy is under recession. This did not effect the growth of the Australian economy as such and it is well evident in its GDP indicator (4.7 per cent) for 2000-01. In fact, the forecasts for the 2002-03 are predicted around 3.75-per cent growth, which is high, compared to other developed nations like the US, Japan and the European Union.

Major international institutions like International Monetary Fund and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development have predicted that the Australian economy will be the best performing economies among the developed nations of the world in 2002-03. (Source:
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The present economic climate of the Australian economy and the business confidence is high in certain sectors and not so high in some sectors. But the overall perception among the world economists and international financial institutions is that Australian economy will witness a high growth.

Considering the positive views on the Australian economy, there are negative factors as well. The one concern is the ageing human capital of the nation. The average age of nations population is getting older and there are not enough births to replace the older members of the country in the workforce. This will lead to lesser productivity, sustainability and overall growth of the economy. The net results will be more government spending on insurance, pensions and other payments to older families. (Source:
www.budget.gov.au/2002-03/budget_overview/html/overview-003.html)

Nevertheless, this is a critical symptom and not yet a disease for the Australian economy. The nations respected doctor, understandably the Australian government, should study, analyse and evaluate the situation about the nations population policy.

Ultimately, markets are created by people. If people are not available to produce and consume, whatever is the fertility and richness of the land, it will be a land of no importance and use to anyone in this planet. In conclusion, the government should have good population planning and budgetary policies on revenue and expenditure in place, to promote the growth of young population in the workforce.