How is it that smaller countries like Malaysia and Taiwan can support their own native car industry (while also importing foreign cars) but Australia can't?
Are the tariffs just not as high to effectively subsidize their local car industry?
To add. I think those counties understand that the car industry helps to invigorate many other parts of the economy, so it's sad to see AUS let that go like that.
A combination of labour costs, being the most isolated country on earth and a tiny local market. Malaysia's GDP per capita is <20% of Australias (49k vs 9k), and the population is 30% bigger (30mil vs 24mil), not to mention the surrounding local markets (Thailand at 68 mil, Vietnam
at 92.7mil).
If a particular indsutry lacks comparative advantage in some country (in this case Australia) it only stands to reason that others do have comparative advantage in it.
So you we can speculate why, in a complicated world, the (cars, Australia) paring works badly while the (education, Australia) and (cars, [South!] Korea) pairings work well and the (cars, Taiwan) paring is somewhere in between.
But an important answer behind all of these is: The market speaketh thus.
Are the tariffs just not as high to effectively subsidize their local car industry?
To add. I think those counties understand that the car industry helps to invigorate many other parts of the economy, so it's sad to see AUS let that go like that.