Has South Africa Liberalised its Trade?

This paper uses new tariff data to re-evaluates the extent to which South Africa has liberalised its trade from the late 1980s. The paper finds that significant progress has been made in simplifying South Africa's tariff structure and reducing tariff protection, but further progress can be made in removing tariff peaks, reducing tariff dispersion, and lowering the anti-export bias arising from protection. Further, although protection has fallen, the decline has been no faster than in other lower-middle-income economies. The paper also finds that estimates of the level of and change in nominal and effective protection are sensitive to the choice of tariff measure (collection duties or scheduled tariff rates) and Input-Output or Supply-Use table, but that the sectoral structure of protection is largely unaffected.