Australia's exports are changing.

• Position: NEWS

If you want to see how much our economy has changed over the past two decades, have a look at our exports says Ross Gittins from the SMH.

There've been big changes in what we export and who we sell it to. Most people are conscious that, since we began opening up our economy to the world in the mid-1980s, we've been importing a lot more stuff. Walk into a supermarket or just the car park--and you see it staring at you.

But while we can see how much we export--it's sitting in other countries' supermarkets and car parks. In fact, however, we're exporting a lot more than we did.

Exports of goods and services now account for about 18 percent of gross domestic product(ion), up from 16 percent in the mid-'80s. They actually got up to 23 percent in 2000, but they've fallen back during the years of our great housing boom. With any luck they'll soon start growing strongly again.

Another thing that's not visible to the naked eye is the changed "composition" of what we export. It will surprise many people that our exports of manufactures have expanded considerably since we began dismantling protection against imports, so that they now account for almost a quarter of...