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by:
Jack M. Nilles
JALA International, Inc.
Los Angeles and Bonn, November 1999
Contact:
Gesellschaft für Kommunikations- und Technologieforschung mbH, Oxfordstr. 2, D-53111 Bonn
Tel.: (+49 02 2) 9 85 30-0, Fax: (+49 02 28) 9 85 30-12, Email: info@empirica.com, http://www.empirica.com, http://www.ecatt.com, Contact: Werner B. Korte
3 Australia
3.1 The economy
Unlike the other countries in this supplemental report, Australia is a member nation of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), the so-called developed world. Like most of the OECD countries, the majority of Australia's workers are information workers, as shown in Figure 5, with agricultural, fishing and mining employment at less than 10% of the workforce. The GNP per capita ratio (relative to that of the United States) is about 0.67 in purchasing power terms.
Figure 5: Estimated composition of the workforce in Australia
The telecommunications industry was deregulated and opened to competition in 1992. By February 1999 18% of all Australian households (1.3 million) had Internet access from their homes-a 50% increase over the prior year and comparable to the household Internet penetration in the United States (although less than that of Finland). The Internet usage forecast is shown in Figure 6.
Although the Internet is quite popular, the cost of a telephone call to the US is still high, about 16 times the cost of a local call. This necessarily has some effect on both call frequency and duration, at least until (and if) Internet telephony becomes widespread.
Figure 6: Estimated Internet users in Australia
3.2 E-commerce
Electronic commerce activity in Australia began to expand rapidly in 1998, more than doubling over the USD83 million value in 1997. That growth rate of about 260% annually is expected to continue for the next few years. As in the US, the dominant portion of the e-commerce volume will be in business-to-business trade rather then the more publicized business-to-consumer e-commerce. Figure 7 shows the anticipated growth of e-commerce in Australia.
Figure 7: Electronic commerce in Australia
3.3 New Ways to Work
Figure 8: Estimated growth of telework in Australia
Australia has been involved in various modes of telework for at least half a century, for both conventional work as well as education, if the outback radio communications system is included in the definition. For the more restrictive telework-with-computers version, Australians have been developing programs since, or before, the mid-1980s. Australian Telecom (now Telstra) and the central government have been assisting development by advocating telework programs and supporting symposia throughout the country. Figure 8 shows the results of the forecast model for Australia, together with the results from the summer (February) surveys of home-based teleworking carried out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1998 and 1999. The country appears to have been well below its forecast potential prior to 1998 but also seems to have more than recovered lost ground in 1998. Quite possibly future growth will be at or even above the nominal growth curve. In any case, the 1998 values are within the performance parameters produced by the forecasting model.
