Riaan de Lange

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Riaan de Lange

This economic and trade-focused column is prepared by Riaan de Lange – riaan@tariffandtrade.co.za. The views expressed in this column are the author's personal views

Only one dam built since 1994

13th May 2022 If you missed last week’s piece, it concluded by stating that South Africa had built only one power station and had not done any better in terms of dams. The piece was about Eskom. The only dam built from scratch since 1994 is the De Hoop dam. How many dams are there in South Africa? The Water... →

Load-shedding 101

6th May 2022 Room 101, in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a torture chamber in the Ministry of Love where prisoners are subjected to their own worst nightmare, fear or phobia. Here is praying that you do not suffer from nyctophobia, the fear of darkness, or that, if you do, you are not reliant... →

Fuel price ‘reduction’

22nd April 2022 For the tax year ended March 31, the South African Revenue Service collected R1.56-trillion in net taxes, constituting R1.88-trillion less refunds of R321.1-billion, which equates to 17.04% of the total. The net collection amounts to R4.28-billion a day. Remember that number. The day before this... →

A pledge is what, exactly?

15th April 2022 If the headline sounds familiar, it is because it is. If you are a regular reader of this column, or happen to have read the November 27, 2020, instalment of this column, it would be déjà vu all over again. Truth be told, I was tempted to merely resubmit that piece, but couldn’t bring myself to... →

Excise essential guide

8th April 2022 The main challenge in international trade is the interchangeable and indiscriminate use of terminology. Take the instance of excise duty – or is it excise tax or excise levy? If you are of the persuasion that it is a case of potayto, potahto; or tomato, tomahto, then you would be mistaken. It... →

Trade Facilitation Agreement

1st April 2022 On February 22, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) celebrated the fifth anniversary of its Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), which entered into force when the WTO obtained acceptance of the TFA by two-thirds of its 164 members. The TFA features commitments to expedite the movement, release and... →

Illusory growth

25th March 2022 On March 9, the Ministry of Finance issued a media release on the Finance Minister’s response to the debate on the 2022 fiscal framework and revenue proposals. There are a few issues that the Minister raised, which you might want to contextualise. “Much has been made of the $750-million loan that... →

GPITT

18th March 2022 Don’t you just love acronyms? Well, I do not. They are my pet peeve. In case you were wondering, the word acronym is created from the Greek roots ‘acr’, which means ‘tip’ or ‘beginning’, and ‘onym’, which means ‘name’. The first known English acronyms, SCOTUS and POT, are said to have appeared in... →

Grass is . . .

11th March 2022 Grass (read marijuana) is nature’s way of saying ‘high’, as the tongue-in-cheek adage goes. Before putting this column to pasture, however, you might be interested to know that on February 18, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) extended an invitation to, by March 04, comment, on a request... →

Mere talk leads to poverty

4th March 2022 “Talk is cheap, because supply exceeds demand”. Should you prefer the proudly South African version – yes, there is one, first referenced in 1955 – it is: "Talk is cheap, but money buys whiskey.” I imagine that in recent months, possibly years, you have been receiving lots of unsolicited talking... →

Recycled SoNA priorities

25th February 2022 As the famed slogan goes, there are three Rs as far as waste management is concerned: reduce, reuse, recycle. But shouldn’t there be a fourth R – rethink? Or rather five, with the sequence being reduce, reuse, repair, rot and recycle? Some would argue there are seven: recycle, refuse, reduce,... →

Priorities not achieved

18th February 2022 When, on February 7, I asked my favourite search engine this question, “What are the most serious problems in South Africa today?”, it directed me to the South African government’s very own website, under the tagline ‘Let's grow South Africa together’. And up popped government’s priorities listed... →

I owe, I owe

11th February 2022 In the King James version of the Bible, Proverbs 22 verse 7 states: “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.” Similarly, in Hamlet, William Shakespeare cautions against being “neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and... →

Déjà vu all over again

28th January 2022 In her book, The Lies about Truth, Courtney C Stevens states: “If nothing changes, nothing changes. If you keep doing what you are doing, you are going to keep getting what you are getting. You want change, make some.” Yet here we are, faced with another International Monetary Fund (IMF) Article... →

422 not out

21st January 2022 If you are reading this column early enough in 2022, you might want to add to your New Year’s resolutions list – that list of realistic and attainable goals – a desire to join your local chamber of commerce and industry. Before rejecting the suggestion out of hand, you might want to take a brief... →

New rules on forex payments

10th December 2021 On November 26, the South African Revenue Service (Sars) informed of its collaboration with the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) to combat illicit financial flows and customs valuation fraud associated with the misuse of advance foreign exchange payments in respect of goods to be imported. The... →

Covid vaccine trade tracker

3rd December 2021 On November 22, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced the launch of the WTO-IMF Covid-19 Vaccine Trade Tracker, which is aimed at providing greater transparency on the cross-border flow of Covid-19 vaccines. The portal features data on the trade... →

Market analysis tools

26th November 2021 By now you must have recovered from the noise that was generated by COP26, which, arguably, should have been labelled a cop-out. If you are not familiar with the reference to ‘cop out’, it simply means to avoid doing something that one ought to do. If you need reminding, the twenty-sixth... →

The final frontier

19th November 2021 You might recall these immortal words, or maybe not, depending on your age: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilisations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!”... →

GATT – 74 not out

12th November 2021 October 30 was the seventy-fourth anniversary of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the predecessor (but not in the truest sense of the word) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). If you have an academic interest in the differences between GATT and the WTO, these – a total of ten... →

HS2022 landing page

5th November 2021 Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1839 work, Letters Addressed to R H Horne, stated that “the luck of the third adventure is proverbial”, said to be the origin of the expression “third time’s a charm”. It simply means that the third time something is attempted, luck is sure to result. It should not be... →

Govt procurement anniversary

29th October 2021 On October 2, as I sat down to write this piece, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) had just released its new webpage to mark the dual anniversary of its plurilateral Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA). The first version of the GPA was adopted in 1981 and entered into force during the days... →

Sars-CoV-2 tariffs

22nd October 2021 The headlight might lead you to believe that it relates to the South African Revenue Service, or Sars. Sars-CoV-2, however, refers to a virus – the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2. This is the virus that causes Covid-19, with the ‘co’ in ‘Covid-19’ standing for corona, the ‘vi’... →

DTIC incentives

15th October 2021 “There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow.” So said Orison Swett Marden, but this begs the question: Would the ‘better tomorrow’ be attributable to incentives? Speaking of incentives, do you know how many incentive... →

Structural transformation

8th October 2021 Could this be the latest South African economic buzzword? Structural transformation, that is. In its publication, Structural Transformation in Developing Countries: Cross Regional Analysis, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) defines it thus: “The transition of an economy... →

HS 2022 now available – gratis

1st October 2021 It’s not often that you get something without having to pay for it. Nowadays, if you are offered something for ‘free,’ it implies that you have to make some kind of commitment, financial or otherwise. There is an exception, though, and this is the World Customs Organisation's (WCO's) HS 2022.... →

Asycuda turns 40

24th September 2021 Before breaking into a celebratory cheer, it bears explaining who, or what, Asycuda is. Asycuda – or the Automated System for Customs Data – is a computerised customs management system covering most foreign trade procedures that was designed by the United Nations Conference on Trade and... →

Scrap metal exportation

17th September 2021 Introduced on May 10, 2013, through a trade policy directive, the Price Preference System (PPS) has been subject to numerous reviews and amendments in recent years. The most recent, which is the subject of this piece, was gazetted on September 3. This was the third for 2021, with the others... →

Customs data analysis

10th September 2021 The World Customs Organisation’s (WCO’s) 2018 ‘Draft Guidance on Data Analytics’ describes data analytics as the process of analysing datasets to discover or uncover patterns, associations and anomalies from sets of structured or unstructured data and to draw practical conclusions. The document... →

National distress duty relief

3rd September 2021 In the instalment of this column published on August 20 and titled ‘Looting Survey and Hotline’, I wrote about the announcement, on August 11, by the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (DTIC), of its survey on the impact of the recent looting on business operations, and of the... →

Pluperfect

27th August 2021 Heard what happened when the Past, the Present and the Future walked into a bar? It was tense. There must have been some ‘tense’ engagements then at the 2021 Public Economics Winter School. If you are not familiar with this School of Economics, you should know that public economics, also known as... →

Looting survey and hotline

20th August 2021 Looting is defined as the act of stealing or the taking of goods by force in the midst of a military, political or other social crisis, such as a war, a natural disaster or rioting. The proceeds of looting are called booty, loot, plunder, spoils or pillage. The Department of Trade, Industry and... →

Team South Africa?

13th August 2021 Do the names Elaine Thompson-Herah, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson mean anything to you? No? What about 10.61, 10.74 and 10.76? These are the times recorded by the top three women athletes in the 100 m sprint final at the Tokyo Olympics on July 31. Quite remarkably, all three ladies... →

Customs inspections

6th August 2021 The Cambridge Dictionary defines an inspection as “the act of looking at something carefully, or an official visit to a building or organisation to check that everything is correct and legal”. As the plural in the title suggests, the South African Revenue Service (Sars) employs various types of... →

The UK’s trade preferences

30th July 2021 The UK’s Department for International Trade (DIT) on July 19 announced an open consultation in its efforts to design the country’s trade preferences scheme for developing nations, with comments due by September 12. The DIT has committed to considering the views of all sectors of society and... →

AEO – calling South Africa

23rd July 2021 Harry S Truman, the thirty-third President of the US, famously said that “there is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know”. In similar vein, Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France before the French Revolution, said: “There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”... →

WCO’s Trade Tools platform

16th July 2021 Over the years, I have written numerous articles and conducted extensive research on the cornerstones of customs, which the World Customs Organisation (WCO) calls the 'international trade actors'. If you need reminding, there are three: tariff classification, also called the Harmonised System... →

Sacu: the oldest of the RTAs

9th July 2021 About 132 years ago, the world’s oldest customs union that is still operational was established – and that’s the South African Customs Union, which brought together the Orange River Colony (previously the Orange Free State) and the Transvaal Colony in 1889. In 1891, Basutoland, which is... →

SA’s competitiveness limbo

2nd July 2021 It is June 17 as I find myself humming Chubby Checker’s Limbo Rock: “All around the limbo clock; Hey, let’s do the limbo rock; Limbo lower now; Limbo lower now; How low can you go . . .” A few minutes earlier, I had completed reviewing the International Institute for Management Development’s... →

Magnificent Seven Plus-1

25th June 2021 If you have not been out for a while and need reminding, a ‘plus-1’ is an extra guest allowed on an invitation to a social event. Which begs the question – well, two in fact: Who was the ‘plus-1’, and where was this social event held? I’ll answer the latter question first: the event was held in... →

RAF Jekyll and Hyde

18th June 2021 The American journalist James Surowiecki avers that, “in the business world, bad news is usually good news – for somebody else”. This is reminiscent of, but perhaps less dramatic than, the Dutch saying, De een z’n dood is de ander z’n brood, which translates as “One man’s death is another man’s... →

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