Stuck in the middle? The structure of trade between South Africa and its major trading partners

Koen Smet

No 115, Department of Economics Working Paper Series from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Abstract: This paper analyses the South African trade data from1992 until 2006 by means of a Grubel-Lloyd index, a measurement of marginal intra-industry trade and a revealed comparative advantage (RCA) indicator. During this period a lot happened that influenced the South African trade policy, e.g. the political transition in 1994, the formation of the World Trade Organisation in 1995, the rise of China as trading power, etc. The purpose is not only to analyse the current structure of South African trade, but also to examine its structural change over time. As a result this paper shows that South Africa is principally a supplier of natural resources to both industrialised and emerging economies. With respect to its African neighbours South Africa has a more advantageous trading position. More general this paper shows that an indicator reaches significant different values, if different trading partners or industries are analysed.(author´s abstract)

Keywords: South Africa; intra-industry trade; trade specialisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://epub.wu.ac.at/876/ original version (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (https://epub.wu.ac.at/876/ [308 PERMANENT REDIRECT]--> https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/876 [302 FOUND]--> https://research.wu.ac.at/en/publications/0c77560e-dadd-44a8-b62f-cb2def35cb95)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wiw:wus005:876

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Paper Series from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WU Library ().