The cost of industry protection

Businesses that campaign for protectionism are self-serving. To advance their narrow commercial interests they demand bans or taxes on imports, obliging consumers to buy their own, more expensive products. This is often dressed up as a broader concern for jobs or the community.

A fundamental shift has occurred to sources of economic growth in Australia. The services sector is the leading creator of growth. It is creating more jobs than manufacturing is losing. The solution to job loss is to foster expansion of job-generating industries. The method is to increase competitiveness in the economy.

Alan Oxley is one of Australia's most authoritative advisers on international trade. He has an enormous depth and spread of experience, drawing on more than 25 years of practice, first in government as a successful trade negotiator and then as an influential adviser to the private sector in the core competences of ITS Global.

Alan has extensive experience advising government and the private sector on strategy and corporate affairs, managing multidisciplinary projects on trade and economic policy and delivering capacity building programs for developing countries in the Asia Pacific region.

He is Chairman of the national Australian APEC Study Centre, one of Australia's leading Asia Pacific Research Centres, based at RMIT University, Melbourne and is the founder and Chairman of World Growth, a free market NGO based in the United States. He is also a Senior Fellow of the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), Brussels.