Trade Openness

In HRV terms, trade openness becomes a binding constraint when the marginal social return to producing for external markets collapses relative to the domestic alternative — either because preferential access is eroding, logistics and tariff architecture raise the effective cost of exporting, or import competition is routed through channels that distort rather than discipline local producers. South Africa sits uncomfortably on all three margins. Exports have flatlined at roughly 30% of GDP for a decade, manufactured export complexity has drifted downward since the commodity supercycle, and the country's single most valuable preferential window — the African Growth and Opportunity Act, under which roughly US$3 billion of SA exports (notably autos and citrus) enter the US duty-free — is now openly contested in Washington ahead of its 2025 review. When the binding question is "why don't firms sell more abroad?", the answer in 2024 is increasingly "because the rules of access are moving faster than the productive capacity can adjust."

The database's ideas cluster into a defensive-offensive pair. On the defensive side, AGOA Retention and Post-AGOA Trade Diversification treats the Washington risk as a forcing function for building redundancy into market access, while Anti-Dumping and Import Surveillance Modernisation and the sector-specific Poultry Industry Anti-Dumping and Local Production Expansion and Steel and Metal Fabrication Master Plan attempt to rebuild ITAC and sectoral enforcement capacity so that openness does not mean defencelessness. On the offensive side, AfCFTA Implementation and Intra-African Trade Expansion and BRICS+ Trade Facilitation and Alternative Payment Systems aim to open genuinely new demand corridors. The common thread is sequencing and institutional home: most run through the dtic and ITAC, most are debated rather than settled, and the higher-impact ideas (4/5) are precisely those addressing the market-access shock rather than the industrial-policy response to it.

Watch three signals over the next year: the outcome and framing of the US AGOA reauthorisation debate and whether Pretoria secures a transitional landing zone; the share of intra-African exports in SA's total goods trade, which has stubbornly hovered near 25% despite AfCFTA ratification; and whether ITAC clears its anti-dumping case backlog, a proxy for whether enforcement capacity is catching up with trade policy ambition.