Trade liberalisation, which kicked off in the dying days of apartheid and involved slashed import tariffs, proved a huge shock to the manufacturing sector — the first of many. “Trade liberalisation was a shock which many companies, after having benefited from apartheid protectionism, probably couldn’t live with. It needed to be better calibrated and better aligned with other policy support instruments and in much closer collaboration with the sector itself,” says Garth Strachan, deputy director-general of the department of trade & industry’s industrial development unit. Abdul Davids comments in this article.
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