Supply Chains

For Australian policymakers interested in investigating supply chain resilience, the ABS’s BLADE tool provides extensive firm-level data on a range of useful characteristics, especially regarding firms’ international trade. Analysis using BLADE can be complemented with a range of open datasets on specific inputs such as labour, human capital, financial capital, intermediate goods, and physical infrastructure. The following provides an outline of key data sources.

Summary of key data sources on Australian supply chain resilience

‘Link’ in Supply Chain	Data Source	Description
Final products (essential goods and services)	ABS BLADE	Extensive data on characteristics of firms including sales, years of operation, foreign ownership, skills, supply chain position, inventory changes, and more. Includes 4-digit ANZSCO. Can be used, among other things, to locate key suppliers and disruptions, calculate proportions of domestic and international supply by industry, and to measure robustness (operation through a shock) and resilience (speed and extent of recovery from shock). See list of variables of interest.
	ABS I-O Tables	Production by industry and final use category (Table 1).
	ANAO National Medical Stockpile audit reports (Dec 2020), (May 2021)	Reports on National Medical Stockpile procurements. Provides detail on the items, quantities and price ranges of critical medical supplies procured by the federal government.
	Therapeutic Goods Administration: Medicine shortage reports	Database of medicine shortages and alternatives, distinguishing between critical and non-critical medicines.
	Open Street Map	Open source world map with coded physical features by sector (e.g. education, healthcare, entertainment). Can be used to examine geographical concentration and transport accessibility of essential services.
Capital, Intermediates, Raw Materials, and Services	ABS BLADE	See above. Also includes business balance sheet data.
	RBA Money and Credit Statistics	Includes Australian bank lending by sector (D5), and business finance outstanding by business size, interest rate type and industry (D14 and D14.1). Can be used to complement BLADE data on creditworthiness in essential sectors (e.g. to create a financial resilience index). (Also has data on business finances, but likely redundant with BLADE.)
	ABS I-O Tables	Data on inputs by industry (ANZSIG06) and final use category including imported inputs (Tables 2 and 3), and employment by industry (Table 20).
Labour and Skills	Australian Skills Classification	Specialist tasks that are unique to one or a cluster of occupations, clusters of similar specialist tasks, all by ANZSCO six-digit code (plus some occupations not directly coded in ANZSCO). Can be used to identify skills used in essential goods and services, estimate substitutability between skills, and how prevalent these skills are across Australia’s economy.
Labour and Skills	Lightcast	Paid. International data on skills and compensation by industry, taken from online job postings and government sources.
Infrastructure	CSIRO TraNSIT Supply Chain Transport and Logistics Dashboard	Freight costs (operating, maintenance, labour), cost density by LGA (for outbound and inbound freight), and supply chain models by commodity and ‘supply chain leg’ (e.g. for wood pulp: chip mill to saw mill to port). Can be used to map domestic supply chains and estimate geographic concentration of freight movements.
	ABS I-O Tables	Data on margins by industry, i.e. the proportions of energy costs and transport services embodied in final value (Tables 21 to 34).
	National Freight Data Hub	Several data tools and visualisations on volumes and values of freight by airport, seaport, and LGA for trucks. 228 datasets in total with state-level transport data. Can be used to examine shipping and air freight trends during COVID-19 disruptions, and indicate congestion (trucks) and container turnaround times (ports).
International Inputs	ABS BLADE	Firm-level customs data for Australian merchandise import transactions over $1000 by ABN. Can be used to locate firm-level supply linkages, supply shocks and responses, and to estimate supply elasticities.
	ABS I-O Tables	Value of imported inputs by industry and final use category (Table 3).
	UN Comtrade	International import and export data on goods and services for all countries. Can be used to estimate trade dependence by sector, and estimate services imports.
	Eora Global MRIO	A balanced global multi-region input–output table with inter-sectoral transfers among 15,909 sectors across 190 countries. Can be used to estimate international supply linkages.
	DFAT Trade Statistical Pivot Tables	Comprehensive public Australian trade data, by month, partner country, and commodity (HS or SITC). Similar uses to Comtrade but more detail and higher frequency for Australia.
Risks	Australian Disaster Resilience Index	Geographic indices of disaster risk, coping capacities, and adaptive capacities across Australia.
	Geopolitical Risk Index	News-based indices of geopolitical risk for 43 countries going back to 1900 (Caldara & Iacoviello 2022).
	World Risk Index	Charts countries’ susceptibility to natural disasters, coping capacities, and adaptive capacities, including access to information and communication technologies.