Half the Venezuelan economy has disappeared

[palou]

Pemalite said:

palou said:

Economically self-sufficient, I mine. Sure, you could survive alone. Would you be able to sustain an economy anywhere close to what you currently hold? No, certainly not. The majority of the value of consumer products purchased in Australia (phones, cars, clothes, etc...) are foreign (as is the case everywhere), and Australia certainly does *not* have the capacity to sustain that within its borders, either.

Looking through the data, yeah... US isn't either. Closer, though. Mostly just by being bigger, lol.

We aren't heavy with manufacturing. We are a resources and services driven economy, that's partially a good thing as we don't need to concern ourselves with trying to compete with China.

But that doesn't mean if the day Australia was to "go it alone" that we couldn't, we do have all the resources we need.
We also do manufacture Clothes, in-fact we have been very successful with our surf brands world-wide like Billabong, Ripcurl. - Even Quicksilver started in Australia before having American claws sunk into them. :P

Car manufacturing (Holden and Toyota) ceased a few years ago, but we do still manufacture vehicles in a small capacity (Military, specialized, market specific and so on).
Ford Australia still has design and development facilities, meaning we are one of the few countries that can design, develop and manufacture mass market cars from absolute scratch if we wanted.

Where we do come up short though is silicon/electronics/processors, we don't have any fabs.

I mean yes, you participate *somewhere* in the process of manufacturing modern consumer good, and designing, and etc... but the point is, so does everyone else. 

 

This kind of stuff:

 

https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.prod-us.s3.amazonaws.com%2F4f613010-73bc-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9?source=next&quality=highest&width=700

 

And each of those parts could certainly be broken down further, where you'd start seeing non-EU countries start to pop up.

 

The enormous efficiency of the modern economy stems from hyper-specialization, something that could certainly not be scaled down to a country the size of Australia effectively.