[5] However, when we look at this in Australia, while the explanation clearly has a lot of attraction, there is less clear-cut evidence for non-mining business investment. Investment spending in the non-mining sector has been even weaker than predicted by our standard aggregate model.
Similarly, we have examined firm-level data and found that corporate investment has been consistently weaker than would be predicted based on past relationships with Tobin's Q (a forward-looking measure of investment opportunities). These results could mask heterogeneity across firms of different sizes (Graph 6).