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Africa Region Working Paper Series No. 95 South Africa ’s Export Performance: Abstract This paper is a result of a wider policy research and knowledge work on growth and jobs issues in South Africa, which the Bank promotes in collaboration with leading South African researchers. The objective is to contribute to major economic and policy issues facing South Africa as it embarks on the second decade of its remarkable democratic transition. These issues include growth and jobs, export competitiveness, service delivery, small and medium-size enterprise development and investment climate, industrial concentration, infrastructure and growth, municipal and financial management, land reform, regional integration, trade and poverty, HIV/AIDS, and––especially important––service delivery. The paper provides three principal results. First, it evaluates the extent to which the composition and level of manufacturing exports have responded to reform initiatives in the 1990s and finds that the successes of these policies in generating export growth have been mixed; the inability to re-structure exports towards dynamic, high-technology products is one explanation for the relatively poor export performance of South African manufacturing during the 1990s. Second, the paper investigates the determinants of South African manufacturing export performance using estimated export supply and demand functions; it shows that South African manufacturers are on average price-takers in the international market and that exports are predominantly supply driven. And third, the paper finds that export growth is constrained by factors that affect the profitability of exports; real effective exchange rate, infrastructure costs, tariff rates and skilled labour are found to be important determinants of export supply.Full
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