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The investment share of GDP for the US was 12% in 2010 according to https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... and I would expect it hasn't moved much since.

US GDP is about $15 trillion/yr right now.

So the $8bn of direct investment you mention is about 0.4% of the investment that happened in the US last year.

A far cry from "owning or controlling a significant part of European and American industries". ;)

Oh, and the $10bn investment into Australia, which has "only" 27% * $1.5e12 = $405bn of investment yearly, is about 2.5% of yearly Australian investment. At that rate you _could_ get to "significant" in several years, if the economy doesn't also grow at several % a year....

(For further comparison, the EU gdp is about 17tn/year and investment is almost 19% of that, so figure about 2.9tn/year.)



Thanks for the info - interesting stuff. The overall investment is a lot lower overall than I thought it would be.

On the topic of Australia, the effect of China's demand for resources can't be understated - they are the main reason there's currently a mining boom here; without them we would probably be stuck in 0-1% growth. As it is we are at 3% GDP growth per annum.


Right. Australia's fundamental "problem" vis-a-vis China is that China has about 70x the population. Which means that even at much lower per-capita income China has a lot of money to throw around compared to the size of the Australian economy...




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