When you decide it’s time to sell up you can advertise your Western Australia business for sale practically everywhere, there are many sites which can be used to list your business and people can search through the directory to see if anything catches their eye. Selling online can be very easy but you have to be careful that you don’t get caught out by people scamming you for information etc. You can’t trust everyone on the internet because you have never met them before and don’t even know if they are telling the truth, this is why many people have been put off dealing over the internet for higher purchases such as this.

Austria has a well-developed social market economy with a high standard of living in which the government has played an important role. For many years, the government and its state-owned industries conglomerate played a very important role in the Austrian economy. Starting in the early 1990s, the parts of this conglomerate collapsed economically and the group began to break apart. State-owned firms were reorganized to operate like private-sector businesses, and the government wholly or partially privatized many of them. Although the government’s privatization work has been successful, some larger firms, utilities, and services are still partially or wholly owned and/or operated by government entities.

Austria enjoys a well-developed industrial base, as well as fully modern banking, transportation, services, and commercial facilities. At present, approximately 370 U.S. firms have subsidiaries, affiliates, franchisees, or licensees in Austria, of which about 150 have regional responsibilities for Central European, Eastern European, or Balkan countries. Austria, and Vienna in particular, faces growing competition for investment dollars from their Eastern neighbors, all of which have been EU members since May 2004; at the same time, the Austrian economy has profited enormously from ties to the booming markets in Central and Eastern Europe.

Austria’s economy performed well in 2006 with a GDP of 320 billion USD, which indicates a real growth rate of 3.3 percent. This is the highest rate since 2000, and about half of a percentage point higher than that of the Euro area average. Growth is expected to ease to under 3 percent this year. The average per capita income of 38,631 USD is among the highest in the EU, and unemployment is low at 4.9 percent.

U.S. exports to Austria in 2006 amounted to 4.8 billion USD while U.S. imports from Austria were 8.5 billion USD, making a bilateral trade volume of 13,3 billion USD. The current weak dollar rate has thus far had no significant effect on Austrian exports to the U.S., in fact, with an increase of 15,5 % in 2006, Austrian positive net exports to the U.S. grew faster than in the three preceding years. This is due to the fact that the statistics chart existing relationships; the impact of the weak dollar has thus far served primarily to magnify the positive net exports and does not (yet) reflect behavior changes. After Germany and Italy, the United States is Austria’s third most important trading partner.

“TO CALL it a catastrophe was a catastrophe,” says Martin Bartenstein, Austria’s economics minister. Last week Alfred Gusenbauer, Austria’s chancellor, called the bid by CVC, a British private-equity group, for Böhler-Uddeholm, an Austrian steelmaker, a catastrophe because the firm is a jewel of Austrian industry. But that is just Mr Gusenbauer’s personal opinion, says Mr Bartenstein. It is not the government’s official position. (The bid was rejected on March 28th.)

Tensions within Austria’s grand coalition of Socialists and the centre-right People’s Party are running high as the political and industrial elite, led by Hannes Androsch, a former finance minister, discusses the establishment of a private-equity fund to protect Austrian companies from foreign takeovers. The so-called Austro-fund would buy controlling stakes in firms such as Böhler (the potential sale of which triggered the debate), Wienerberger, the world’s largest maker of clay bricks, OMV, an oil and gas company, Voest, a steelmaker, and Lenzing, a maker of cellulose fibre. The fund’s start-up capital would be €1 billion ($1.3 billion), which would grow to at least €5 billion.

Leading bankers and industrialists are at loggerheads over the idea. Andreas Treichel, the boss of Erste Bank, Austria’s second-biggest bank, says he will not play ball. Nor will the head of Wiener Städtische, an insurance company, or the boss of Wienerberger. Ludwig Scharinger, the boss of Raiffeisenbank, another bank, and Christoph Leitl, the head of the Economic Chamber, a lobby group, are in favour of the plan. Veit Sorger, head of the Federation of Austrian Industry, says Austrian capital in Austrian companies is a good thing, but the Austro-fund must not get preferential treatment over other private-equity firms. Politicians are mooting a state guarantee for the fund and tax exemptions for its dividend payments. Some have even talked about a re-nationalisation of Böhler through a takeover by the ÖIAG, Austria’s state holding agency. (Böhler was fully privatised in 2003.)

Austria has a history of protectionism and strong state intervention in business. In 2004, it rebuffed Siemens of Germany for taking an interest in VA Technologie, a smaller Austrian firm, and authorised ÖIAG to take up Siemens’ intended share of a planned VA Tech capital increase instead. In the same year the government turned down a deal to sell the state’s 42% stake in Telekom Austria to Switzerland’s Swisscom, and shelved plans to sell a quarter of the state-owned postal service to Germany’s Deutsche Post.

Yet even while keeping foreigners at arm’s length, Austrian banks and companies are big investors in eastern Europe, where cultural and economic ties dating from the Habsburg empire give the Austrians a competitive edge over bigger rivals from farther afield. Some 6% of foreign direct investment in central and eastern Europe is Austrian. Telekom Austria is one of the top telecoms companies in the region. Vienna’s stock exchange bought the bourse in Budapest and is showing an interest in the stock exchanges in Bulgaria and Slovenia. Erste Bank makes almost two-thirds of its profits in eastern Europe.

“We used to say ‘Come to Austria—we are the better Germany’,” says Mr Bartenstein, who was in China this week to tout the advantages of doing business with and in Austria. Even if the Austro-fund never sees the light of day, he worries that the debate about it is damaging his country’s business-friendly reputation in London and Frankfurt—and, even more important, in Sofia, Bucharest and Belgrade.