Indian boom drives Australian economy

Melbourne, May 10 (UNI) The insatiable Indian and Chinese demand for Australian resources has played a significant role to enable the Australian government deliver a record 14.8 billion dollar budget surplus and tax relief and allocation package of 28.2 billion dollar.

The 2006-07 Australian budget papers have put forward that the commodity demand from the world's emerging economic superpowers is also expected to bring many other significant structural changes to the Australian economy.

The papers further said India and China are in the process of a 'catch-up' with the rest of the developed world. The world's most populous countries are going through the same process as experienced by Japan in the second half of the last century.

''Continuing strong growth in India and China is arguably the international economic development with the most far-reaching consequences for the global economy,'' the papers said.

Highlighting that both these countries may continue to grow at their recent average growth rates for quite some time to come, the Australian budget papers said the experts are also predicting that the emergence of India and China as world's leading consumer of resources like coal and iron ore would enable the Australian finance officials to offer more tax cuts.

The surge in Indian economy has seen an unprecedented increase in demand in gold, one of the major natural resource produced in Australia.

Australia provides 25 per cent of India's gold requirement with a market value of over 2.5 billion dollar.

The economic pundits are confident that the upswing in the Indo-Australia trade links would continue at the current pace and the bilateral trade is likely to touch 16 billion dollar mark by 2010.

The trade between the two Indian Ocean rim countries has trippled in the last three years and the current figure is 7.5 billion dollar.

Currently, Australian exports to India are worth six billion dollar while the imports from India are a quarter of the figure at 1.5 billion dollar. The Australian trade surplus from India is thus a massive 4.5 billion dollar.

Besides gold, the major Australian exports to India include coal, diamond, copper and wool.

UNI XC CS RN1037