The Impact of Current Account Balance on Economic Growth in South Africa

Nkosinathi Emmanuel Monamodi ()
Additional contact information
Nkosinathi Emmanuel Monamodi: Department of Economics and Finance, Economic and Management Sciences Faculty, University of the Free States, Phuthaditjaba 9869, South Africa

Economies, 2024, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-16

Abstract: This study investigates the impact of South Africa’s current account balance on its economic growth from Q1 2015 to Q4 2022 using Auto Regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) technique. This study incorporates qualitative variables like COVID-19 to understand its effect on the South African current account and economic growth rate. Generally, the results show that the South African current account deficit impacted economic growth in both the long and short run. COVID-19 also affected the current account significantly in both the long and short run, thus causing more deterioration on the South African current account and subsequently affecting the economic growth rate negatively. This study recommends more competitive export promotion and import substitution by investing in and developing domestic productivity. This study also recommends an acceleration of the tabled COVID-19 recovery initiatives through an alliance between the government and private sector.

Keywords: current account balance; economic growth; ARDL; COVID-19; South Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E F I J O Q (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7099/12/2/39/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7099/12/2/39/ (text/html)

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:gam:jecomi:v:12:y:2024:i:2:p:39-:d:1332194

Access Statistics for this article

Economies is currently edited by Ms. Hongyan Zhang

More articles in Economies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().