Flaky Trump derails SA car exports
It’ll be a blow for the country’s automotive sector if the US president imposes tariffs there too
After imposing tariffs on steel and aluminium, US president Donald Trump is now going for the big kahuna: cars. And if the pattern is repeated, SA has a big problem. SA’s exports of cars and automotive products to the US have exploded since the advent of the African Growth & Opportunity Act (Agoa) in 2000. SA’s exports to the US were R3.2bn in 2005 and rose to R22.6bn in 2016, a 606% increase. Imports from the US have also increased, but at a lower rate, so now there is a yawning gap, which is precisely what the act intended; the whole idea was to foster African industrialisation. But it has led to a material trade mismatch: in 2005, US exports to SA were about the same as imports; in 2016, they were about R11.5bn.
This is minuscule in terms of US car imports in total; the EU exported cars worth about US$43bn to the US last year, about 7% of total US sales. But still there remains a roughly two-to-one imbalance, and given that SA was politically hostile to the US even before T...
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