The Importance Of Contribution To Shaping Australia's Economy

There have been several factors that have worked towards shaping the Australian economy into what we know today. The biggest contribution to the development of the Australian economy was the discovery of gold in 1851, which lead to a huge rush of Australian workers leaving the workforce to look for gold, as well as a major influx in international migration. The main gold mining centre in the 1850s was Victoria, which rose from a population of 80,000 in 1851 to 540,000 in 1861. As a whole, the population of Australia increased exponentially from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7million in 1871 (Wells, 2015). This lead to the colonial governments issuing bonds into the London market in order to fund infrastructure for the growing population, and thus establishing Australia’s first stock exchange in 1861. …show more content…
Majority of government owned firm issued bonds occurred in the 1920s, and were used to fund public programs, such as ones following the end of the First World War. Corporate bonds began to decline in the 1930s, due to both the financial effect of the Great Depression on the country’s GDP, and the government’s limitations on bond issuance. This control was to hopefully allocate resources to more demanding projects such as war expenditure. Because of the uncertainty surrounding Australia’s economic future, these controls were implemented so as to reduce the influence corporations had in the market. Thus, as a result of the Great Depression, corporate bonds reached 80% of the GDP in the year 1933 (Black et al.,