The Impact of Mining and Services Industries on the Structural Change of Australia

Both services and mining industries gained relatively more importance in the structural changes occurring, particularly in recent years, where the rate of structural change has increased. The study aims at defragmenting the mining and services industries, and analyses their impacts on structural change. VAR model, where activity is measured in terms of output, shows social and business services to have more forecasting abilities than other variables. On the hand, VAR model where activity is measured in terms of investment shows the mining industry to have relatively less Mean Absolute Errors forecasts. Results deteriorate as one moves from one step ahead to twelve step ahead forecasts, suggesting longer periods of one step ahead forecasting should be used to avoid cyclical fluctuations in activity variables such as output or investment for industries.