South Africa's susceptibility to financial crises

Abstract

South Africa has to address the challenges of slow economic growth, poverty, and inequality in the face of precarious macroeconomic imbalances - foreign capital is used to fund deficits of savings to investment, of tax income to government spending, and of exports to imports. Just how susceptible does this make the South African economy to an external shock? This paper extends a 'resilience indicator' developed by Rojas-Suarez (2015) and applies it for the first time to the case of South Africa and 22 other emerging market economies. We compared the 2007 values (pre-2008 financial crisis) to the corresponding 2013 values, and found that South Africa has become less resilient to an external shock than many of its peers. South Africa lost six positions on the index ranking between 2007 and 2013. South Africa is, therefore, more vulnerable to an external shock than most comparable emerging market economies.