Close Trading Partners

Australia has strong ties with many nations across the world and has done extremely well with imports and exports. One of their closest trading partners is the United Kingdom, who they signed a free trade agreement with in order to make trade between the two nations easy and more profitable (UK Government, 2022). The top textile and clothing importers to Australia are China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the United States (World Bank, 2022). The United States is the outlier as it is the only nation in the top six who are not in Asia. All countries face issues when it comes to trade; these are called barriers to trade. Barriers to trade are things that could get in the way of a country’s ability to trade with other nations, there are a variety of issues that can pose as barriers (Sternquist, 2007). Australia currently has tariff based quotas in place for businesses who want to import products into the country as well as permits that need to be filled out to allow the imports into the country (Australian Government, 2022). A tariff based quota means that after a company imports a certain amount of products tariffs begin to get added to the cost of their import (AUS Trade, 2022). Quotas are put in place on imports so that Australian work and products aren’t all coming from overseas and aren’t taking away from the production and economy of the country.