Trade and Regional Integration in South Africa: FY2019/20

South African exports have grown faster than imports during the period from 2015 to 2018. This has improved South Africa’s gross official reserves due to the improvement of the merchandise trade balance. The growth in exports led to a short-term improvement of South Africa’s current account balance. South Africa is still heavily dependent on mineral commodity exports which are also amongst its top export to the Southern African Development Community (SADC). In addition, South Africa is poorly integrated in terms of regional trade with neighbouring countries in SADC and its trade is unbalanced due to the significant trade surplus enjoyed by the country. This suggests that there is significant room to increase South Africa’s imports from SADC countries.