Tag: import tariffs

Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) General Secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali’s thought-provoking, in-depth piece advocating the ostensible strengths of the government's localisation plans refers ('Ideologues do the jobless a disservice by turning localisation into a swearword', January 9).

While we acknowledge the positive structural reforms currently underway by government – most notably the lifting of the self-generation threshold to 100MW – command control plans of enforced localisation stand to undo any potential positive upsides of other reforms.

With these words, a webinar on the new African Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was launched to discuss the importance of assessing the current trade relations with Africa, and how the new agreement will enable them to build on this. The AfCFTA, which came into force this year, is the largest trade agreement in the world, and aims to double intra-Africa by 2022.

South Africa’s economic recovery relies to a large extent on creating a more enabling business environment and putting the right structural economic reforms in place. The country needs to prioritise those reforms that will deliver results both in the short and long term and put the ruling party’s tendency to revert to ideological thinking aside in the interests of rescuing the economy.

Amid an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape, the looming possibility of a global trade war carries the risk of severe negative macroeconomic consequences, in that both the US and Chinese economies could begin to decelerate, triggering a world-wide recession.