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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

Economic freedom

By: Riaan de Lange 5th August 2022 If freedom is “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants”, what does economic freedom mean? Evidently ‘freedom’ and ‘economic freedom’ tend to be expressed in four pillars. The late former US President, Franklin D Roosevelt, identified four fundamental freedoms that everyone ought... →

Shades of greylisting

By: Riaan de Lange 29th July 2022 In case the headline confused you or made you wonder whether ‘shades of grey’ means “the situation does not make it clear what is right and what is wrong”, let me be clear: ‘greylisting’ is bad. In fact, it is dreadful. Truth be told, it’s a new word to me. We are all familiar with ‘blacklisting’... →

Gold to the future

By: Riaan de Lange 22nd July 2022 Doctor Emmett Brown: “No! It cannot be; I just sent you back to the Future!” Marty McFly: “No, I know; you did send me back to the Future. But I am back – I am back from the Future”. Doctor Emmett Brown: “Great Scott!” I had a McFly moment on July 4, when the governor of the Reserve Bank of... →

Calling on small businesses

By: Riaan de Lange 15th July 2022 In 2021, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the International Trade Centre (ITC) – established by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the United Nations (UN) through the UN Conference on Trade and Development – and the WTO Informal Working Group on Micro, Small and Medium Sized... →

I owe, I owe – the sequel

By: Riaan de Lange 8th July 2022 Over the 21 years of writing this column, there has been the odd temptation to simply resubmit an earlier instalment because, in South Africa, the more things change, the more they remain the same. It took immense willpower to resist the latest temptation, and that was when, on June 13, the... →

Customs matters

By: Riaan de Lange 1st July 2022 It’s not often that a book on customs is published. The last such book of significance that I can recall was published in 2003 by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) it’s Customs: Challenges and Strategies for the Reform of Customs Administrations and made the case for the modernisation and... →

Operation Vulindlela update

By: Riaan de Lange 24th June 2022 What do you know about Operation Vulindela? The piece published in this column on April 2, 2021, headlined ‘Operation Vulindlela’, might provide some insight, or maybe not. The operation’s most recent ‘honorary’ mention appeared in the National Treasury’s media statement of June 7 about the... →

Fuel price ‘reduction’ extension

By: Riaan de Lange 17th June 2022 On May 31, the National Treasury and the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy issued a media release announcing the “extension of the temporary reduction in the general fuel levy”. This followed a March 31 media release headlined ‘Short-term relief measures to address fuel price increases’,... →

Trade Facilitation Innovation

By: Riaan de Lange 10th June 2022 The Trade Facilitation Committee was created on February 22, 2017, when the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) entered into force. The TFA contains provisions for expediting the movement, release and clearance of goods, including goods in transit. It also sets out measures for effective... →

CPI + 7%

By: Riaan de Lange 3rd June 2022 “I’ll have what she’s having” is from the memorable restaurant scene in the 1989 comedy, When Harry Met Sally. I was reminded of this when reading a May 20 release from the South African Revenue Service (Sars) titled ‘Media statement on negotiations between Sars and organised labour’. As stated... →

Do not overthink it

By: Riaan de Lange 27th May 2022 The most challenging economics class to teach is the first-year university class, for the students already ‘know’ all there is to know. This gels with what my grandfather used to tell me: when you start doing something new, you tend to be quite opinionated and wise with respect to the required... →

SA TIED UP

By: Riaan de Lange 20th May 2022 When does one throw in the towel? Some of my fondest childhood memories are of evenings spent with my father at West Ridge Park, watching boxing, which was not really my favourite pastime, but my father’s. I recall many a fight where the losing boxer’s trainer would throw in a towel or a sponge.... →

Only one dam built since 1994

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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... →

100-year floods

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 29th April 2022 Growing up in Kwazulu-Natal, I would regularly travel with my father to far-flung parts of the province as he embarked on community infrastructure projects. On these trips, he would point out the ‘100-year’ flood marks. As a youngster, I took the 100-year period literally, as I suspect many... →

Fuel price ‘reduction’

By: Riaan de Lange 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?

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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 . . .

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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... →

Educatum, Educare – Mediocris

By: Chanel de Bruyn 4th February 2022 “There are two kind of statistics: the kind you look up and the kind you make up,” so said Rex Stout. For their part, Mark Twain and Milton Friedman stated that “facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable” and that “statistics do not speak for themselves” respectively. More quotations:... →

Déjà vu all over again

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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

By: Riaan de Lange 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... →

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