This research concerns South Africa's trade embargo and how it affected the country’s wine exports when apartheid came to an end. The goal is to determine the significance of the sanctions and trade agreements for this export. Specifically, sanctions and certain trade agreements are studied between the years 1990 and 2010.
During this time, sanctions were imposed on South Africa because of apartheid. In 1994, apartheid ended, and then all sanctions ended as well. To assess this, a gravity model is used. In this case, the model specifically estimates an additional parameter which are the sanctions. The estimated results show that wine exports increased by 519 percent after 1994 to 2010. This is a large increase that is economically significant. This may be due the general globalization in the world during the same time, but as other large wine exporters do not have as high increase in their export (around 400 percent) it seems that the ending of apartheid had an effect. The changes in South Africa's wine exports increased after 1994 and after 2000. These changes appear to be specific to South Africa. The conclusion of these results is that the end of apartheid had an impact on South Africa's wine exports. The results also indicate that trade policy appears to have an impact on South Africa's economic growth. This opens to speculation about how trade policy can be used to control other countries.
Julia Linderson Agricultural Economics and Management
I am a national economic student in the agricultural economics program at Swedish University of Agricultural Science. My e-mail is firstname.lastname@example.org