South Africa’s active yet unequal trade with China

From afar, the China-South Africa trade relationship looks amazing, but when you look at the figures more closely, some real problems become evident.

From afar, the China-South Africa trade relationship looks amazing. Last year, the two countries sold more than $52 billion worth of goods to one another — mostly raw materials from South Africa and finished goods from China.

But when you look at the figures more closely, some real problems become evident. While trade volumes between the two countries have grown exponentially over the past twenty years, so has South Africa’s trade deficit with China, which reached almost $10 billion last year.

Marvellous Ngundu, a research consultant at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, explored the problem in a recently published paper and joins Eric & Cobus to discuss what can be done to balance out this “active, yet highly unequal” trading relationship.

Show Notes:

Institute for Security Studies: South Africa’s trade deficit dilemma with China by Marvellous Ngundu

Bloomberg: A New ‘China Shock’ Is Destroying Jobs Around the World by Katia Dmitrieva, Philip Heijmans, and Prima Wirayani

South China Morning Post: Jeffrey Sachs rejects US claims of Chinese overcapacity: ‘absolutely wrong’ by Sylvia Ma

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