China’s investment in Australia last year plunged to a record low of A$1 billion (US$775 million), according to data compiled by the Australian National University (ANU), as relations between the two countries soured amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Investment by Chinese companies in Australia fell 61 percent, following a 47 percent fall in the prior year.
This was the lowest level of activity in the six-year history of the data that are part of the ANU’s Chinese Investment in Australia Database.
Photo: Reuters
The number of projects recorded was only 20, well down from a peak of 111 in 2016, when investment amounted to A$16.5 billion.
Relations between the two nations deteriorated last year after Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison led calls for an independent probe into the origins of COVID-19 and saw China hit products from barley to wine to lobsters with tariffs, anti-dumping probes or delays at port.
Separately, Australia tightened investment-screening arrangements with foreign powers.
The dip “reflects the effects of COVID, but also more scrutiny of foreign investment by the Australian government, particularly that from China,” Shiro Armstrong, director of the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research at the ANU, wrote in a release yesterday.
Laws passed in December last year give Australia’s foreign minister the power to stop signed agreements between overseas governments and Australia’s eight states and territories, and with local authorities and universities.
Armstrong said that 86 percent of the investment last year was from Chinese companies already established in Australia, and was limited to the real-estate, mining and manufacturing sectors.
“In 2020, the year of COVID-19, foreign direct investment fell globally by 42% according to the United Nations,” Armstrong wrote.
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