How trade and foreign investment affect the growth of a small but not so open economy: Australia?

This article analyses the impact of trade and foreign investment on a small but not so open economy, Australia, whose growth rate outpaced the majority of the OECD countries in the last decade. We model five channels of outward orientation: exports, imports, foreign direct investment, foreign portfolio investment and other foreign investment. A cointegrated vector autoregressive model, complemented by a robust Granger noncausality test, is specified to identify permanent channels of outward orientation. Imports and direct investment are found to have a growth effect in the long run. The effect of imports is almost three times that of direct investment.