This publication is the 1st finished account of the way Australia attained the world's optimum dwelling criteria inside a couple of many years of eu cost, and the way the country has sustained an enviable point of source of revenue to the current. Why Australia Prospered is an engaging old exam of ways Australia cultivated and sustained fiscal progress and good fortune. starting with the Aboriginal economic system on the finish of the eighteenth century, Ian McLean argues that Australia's impressive prosperity throughout approximately centuries was once reached and maintained by means of a number of transferring components. those incorporated imperial guidelines, favorable demographic features, traditional source abundance, institutional adaptability and innovation, and growth-enhancing coverage responses to significant fiscal shocks, equivalent to warfare, melancholy, and source discoveries.

Natural source abundance in Australia performed a fashionable function in a few sessions and pale in the course of others, yet total, and opposite to the traditional view of economists, it used to be a blessing instead of a curse. McLean indicates that Australia's position was once now not a quandary while the overseas financial system was once headquartered within the North Atlantic, and have become a good impression following Asia's modernization. Participation on this planet buying and selling procedure, while it flourished, introduced major merits, and through the interwar interval while it didn't, Australia's security of household production didn't considerably stall development. McLean additionally considers how the country's infamous origins as a convict payment certainly encouraged early productiveness degrees, and the way British imperial regulations superior prosperity through the colonial interval. He seems to be at Australia's contemporary resource-based prosperity in ancient viewpoint, and divulges impressive components of continuity that experience underpinned the evolution of the country's economic climate because the 19th century.