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16 Business View Australia - February 2015
Keeping its Country Productive
The economic significance of the Australian logistics industry
The efficiency of Australia’s Logistics industry is vital
to the nation’s productivity and wellbeing.
Measures of the economic significance of transport
are reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics
but they significantly understate the expenditure on
Logistics because they do not record these services
when they are undertaken by firms on their own ac-
count and they fail to capture logistics activities not
directly related to the movement of physical goods.
ACIL Allen has made an estimate of the true size
and impact of Logistics in Australia and estimated
that
Logistics employs 1.2 million people and added
$131.6 billion dollars to Australia’s economy in
2013. This represents 8.6 per cent of the nation’s
GDP in 2013.
Every industry in Australia depends on transport
and logistics to some degree. Low cost transport
and logistics allows Australian exporters to profit-
ably reach key markets, helps Australian manufac-
turers to keep cost-competitive in the face of cheap
imports and enables firms within Australia to com-
pete over a larger area, bringing lower prices and
greater choice to consumers. Using Computable
General Equilibrium ACIL Allen has estimated that a
1 per cent improvement in the efficiency of this in-
dustry generates $2 billion of gains to the economy
each year.
There are risks to the efficiency of Logistics in Austra-
lia, for example urban congestion, inefficient regula-
tion, an ageing workforce and difficulty in identifying
and investing in infrastructure because of financing
and planning constraints.
Australia’s system of national accounts measures
the economic impact of an industry called Trans-