Social & Economic Issues · Data analysis
In 1964 Donald Horne called Australia “the lucky country,” and he did not mean it kindly. The place, he wrote, was “run by second-rate people who share its luck,” getting rich off what sits under the ground rather than the ideas above it. Sixty years on, the trade figures suggest he had a point.
Most of us now use the phrase as a compliment, which rather misses what Horne was getting at. Luck is not a plan. One way to check whether Australia has moved past its reliance on raw resources is the Economic Complexity Index (ECI), a score Harvard’s Growth Lab builds from how varied and how rare a country’s exports are. Australia does not come out well.
Australia keeps falling on economic complexity
World rank on the Economic Complexity Index (1 = most complex). A line sloping downward means Australia is being overtaken.
Chart 1 of 5 · Source: Harvard Growth Lab (2025). Hover any point for the exact rank.
Australia now sits 89th of 145 countries, down about 49 places since the mid-1990s. So why does a rich country rank so low? It helps to look at what we actually sell.
Two-thirds of what we sell is dug out of the ground
Share of Australian merchandise exports, by product category
Chart 2 of 5 · Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (2025). Multivariate (category × year × share). The grey “Other / unclassified” band is the residual so categories total 100%. Hover any band for the yearly figure.
In 2024, fuels and ores made up about 67% of what we shipped overseas, while manufactured goods (the complex products that push a country up the rankings) came to just 9.6%. That mix is what drags down the line in Chart 1. But does it actually matter if a country is rich without being complex? It helps to see where Australia sits next to everyone else.
Wealthy, but not complex
Economic complexity vs GDP per capita, 2023 (bubble size = population)
Chart 3 of 5 · Sources: Harvard Growth Lab (2025); World Bank via OWID (2025). Multivariate (4 variables). Hover any bubble; Australia is ringed in red.
Most wealthy countries sit up and to the right, with both high incomes and high complexity. Australia sits off on its own: rich, but well to the left on complexity. The money comes from what it sells, not from how cleverly it makes things. Other countries with plenty of resources show it does not have to play out this way.
Australia is the laggard among resource economies
World ECI rank over time, Australia (red) vs comparable exporters
Chart 4 of 5 · Source: Harvard Growth Lab (2025). Multivariate (country × year × rank). Australia is the thick red line. Hover any line to highlight it and fade the others; double-click to reset.
Canada and Norway have just as much oil, gas and minerals, yet they sit much higher up the table. Even Chile and Saudi Arabia are close to or ahead of Australia. So the “resource curse” is not a fixed outcome. It comes down to what a country decides to build alongside its mines, and that decision carries into the years ahead.
Low complexity today, slower growth tomorrow
Harvard’s 10-year growth projection vs economic complexity. The dashed line is the overall trend.
Chart 5 of 5 · Source: Harvard Growth Lab Growth Projections (2025). Multivariate (complexity, projected growth, country group). Hover any point; Australia is in red.
The pattern is hard to miss: more complex economies are forecast to grow faster. Australia’s projection of around 1.2% a year leaves it near the back of the developed world. The mining boom, a once-in-a-century run of selling to a fast-growing China, bought the country time. It did not change what the country actually makes.
“Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.” - Donald Horne, 1964
The figures do not say the luck has finally run out. They say we are still living off it. The open question, for readers and for the people setting policy, is how long a country can keep getting by on what it digs up while everyone else keeps getting smarter.
Harvard Growth Lab. (2025). Growth projections and complexity rankings [Data set]. Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XTAQMC
Horne, D. (1964). The lucky country: Australia in the sixties. Penguin Books.
Our World in Data. (2025). GDP per capita (World Bank) [Data set]. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank
Our World in Data. (2025). Population [Data set]. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population
World Bank. (2025). World development indicators: Merchandise exports by product group [Data set]. https://data.worldbank.org
Anthropic. (2026). Claude [Large language model]. https://claude.ai
I acknowledge the use of Claude (Anthropic, https://claude.ai) during this assignment. I used it to help scope candidate open-data sources, to cross-check data values against the original providers, and to help debug parts of my R code. Prompts I used were along the lines of “which open datasets measure economic complexity for Australia over time,” “explain this readr/dplyr error,” and “is this stacked-area code summing to 100 percent.” Every figure quoted in the article is generated in R directly from the source data, and I verified the headline numbers (Australia’s rank, the export shares and the growth projection) against the Harvard Growth Lab and World Bank files myself. The story idea, the angle, the choice and checking of the data, the design of all five visualisations and the final code are my own work. All data wrangling and every chart were produced by me in R (ggplot2 and plotly); no visualisation was generated by an AI tool. AI suggestions were not used without checking them against the primary sources.