According to various reports in the media, the Australian economy is enjoying a wave of prosperity, marking 15 years of uninterrupted growth in 2006, despite two global downturns.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international organisation representing 30 developed countries, 25 of which are described as high-income countries by the World Bank, expects Australia to continue to grow more rapidly than most other OECD economies in 2007.

Forkliftaction.com News decided to test this prediction with a thoroughly unscientific, anonymous mini-poll amongst a handful of forklift dealers. All confirmed that their sales for the first six months of 2007 had exceeded the figures for the same period last year, most by around 10% but one company claimed an increase of a whopping 54%.

In 2007 and for the sixth year running, the worldwide executive opinion survey conducted for the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook assessed Australia's economy as among the most resilient in the world. Australia was rated as the third most resilient economy for countries with a population greater than 20 million.

A decade of economic and institutional reforms has increased the responsiveness of Australia to shifts in the global economy and delivered world's best practice financial, legal and political systems. This has enabled Australia to better withstand global economic pressures, while strong economic fundamentals including low inflation and low unemployment, have maintained consumer confidence and domestic demand. In 2006, Australia's export earnings continued to rise sharply reflecting rapid growth in commodity export prices. Business investment also grew strongly, underpinned by high capacity utilisation and robust company profits.

According to a recent article in the Courier Mail, Australia's economy is in overdrive.
The global minerals boom continued to boost the economy in the three months to June.
The price of Australian goods exported rose faster than import prices for the 14th quarter in a row, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show.

Export prices rose by 0.3% in the quarter - to be up by 2.4% from a year earlier. They were underpinned by metal prices, which jumped 7% in the quarter and 24.4% throughout the year.

Governor Glenn Stevens in his address to a business forum in mid-June stated that the Australian economy is on the cusp of the seventeenth year of the expansion which began in the second half of 1991. There is, at the moment, moreover, a high degree of confidence about the future, with share prices near record highs, property markets firming again and borrowing proceeding apace.

According to Stevens, the trends in the global economy have imparted a very large expansionary impetus to the Australian economy. The rise in resource prices (and to a lesser extent a decline in global prices for manufactured goods) have increased Australia's terms of trade by about 40 per cent over the past four years to their highest level since the 1950s.