Abstract
As a country that has historically lived off international sales of primary commodities, Australians need to understand better than most the cyclical fashion in which commodity markets move and the risks entailed in that recurring pattern. To that end, this chapter investigates the way that political risks have been, and are still being, handled in the three nations from the Asia-Pacific region that have successively led the world in steel production through the last century—the United States, Japan and China. The implications for Australia, which has now emerged as the world’s largest exporter of iron ore, associated with each of these three regions are sketched out, with greater detail on the ‘super-cycle’ derived from the phenomenal expansion of Chinese steel production in recent decades.
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Abbreviations
- EAAU:
-
East Asian Analytical Unit
- GATT:
-
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
- GFC:
-
Global Financial Crisis
- NSW:
-
New South Wales
- OPEC:
-
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
- SA:
-
South Australia
- UK:
-
United Kingdom
- US:
-
United States
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Leaver, R. (2017). Iron Ore. In: O’Callaghan, T., Graetz, G. (eds) Mining in the Asia-Pacific. The Political Economy of the Asia Pacific. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61395-6_9
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