In 1964, Donald Horne called Australia “the lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.” Sixty years on, the data suggests we are still living off the luck and running short of it. Here are five charts that ask whether Australia is still the lucky country, or just a lucky one.
Australia is the 9th-richest country on Earth by income per person. But on the Harvard Growth Lab’s Economic Complexity Index a measure of how diverse and sophisticated a nation’s exports are we rank 74th out of 145, the second-lowest of any OECD nation and below every other G20 economy. Wealthy, but not clever: our prosperity rests on what we dig up, not what we know how to make.
Hover each marker for the exact ranking. Australia sits in the global top tier for income, but only mid-pack for the complexity of what it produces.
Plot every economy by how complex it is (across) against how rich it is (up), and a clear relationship appears: sophisticated economies tend to be wealthy ones. Australia (in red) is a striking exception perched high on income but far to the left on complexity, clustered with oil and mineral exporters rather than with the advanced manufacturers it likes to compare itself to.
Bubble size = population; colour = region; the dashed line is the overall trend. Hover any bubble for detail, or use the legend to isolate a region. Australia (ringed, bottom-right of the wealthy cluster) is rich for an economy this simple.
Australia’s export income comes overwhelmingly from things we dig out of the ground or grow. Four commodities iron ore, coal, gas and gold earn more than A$330 billion a year between them. Complex manufactured goods barely register in the top tier. We are, in trade terms, a quarry and a farm with a high standard of living.
Colour groups each export by sector. Hover a bar for its value. Every top earner is extracted or grown none is a complex manufacture.
This wasn’t always the plan. Manufacturing the classic engine of complex, skilled, well-paid work has shrunk from around an eighth of the economy in 1990 to just 5% of GDP, the lowest share in the OECD and less than half the world average. South Korea, which was poorer than Australia in the 1960s, chose the opposite path.
Click a country in the legend to hide/show its line; hover for yearly values. Australia’s line (red) falls while South Korea’s (blue) holds near 25%.
The path from a simple economy to a complex one runs through research and development yet Australia spends just 1.7% of GDP on R&D, below the OECD average of 2.7% and a fraction of leaders like Korea and Israel. Worse, business R&D has been flat for years. Complexity is a choice, and right now we are choosing not to buy it.
Hover any point for the exact figure. Australia (red) sits level with Canada and well below the dashed OECD average and far behind Korea, which once looked to Australia as the richer nation.
Australia is still a lucky country but its luck is a finite seam of iron ore and gas, not a renewable resource of skill and invention. The data is a warning Donald Horne would recognise: prosperity inherited from the ground is not the same as prosperity we know how to make.
Harvard Growth Lab, Atlas of Economic Complexity rankings: https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/rankings
Australia country profile: https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/36
ECI values — Observatory of Economic Complexity, 2023 rankings: https://oec.world/en/country-rankings/2023/complexity
GDP per capita (NY.GDP.PCAP.CD) — World Bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD
Population (SP.POP.TOTL) — World Bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL
DFAT, Australia’s trade in goods and services 2024–25: https://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/trade-and-investment-data-information-and-publications/trade-statistics/trade-in-goods-and-services
Top 25 exports (direct PDF): https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/australia-goods-services-exports-imports-2025.pdf
World Bank, Manufacturing value added % of GDP (NV.IND.MANF.ZS): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS
OECD, Gross domestic spending on R&D: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.html
ABS, R&D Businesses 2023–24 (Australia’s BERD figure): https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/technology-and-innovation/research-and-experimental-development-businesses-australia/latest-release
I did not use Gen AI while working on this assignment.
All visualisations built in R (ggplot2 + plotly). Data: Harvard Growth Lab, OEC, DFAT, World Bank and OECD. See the submission document for full APA 7th-edition references and a generative-AI acknowledgement.