A new report (gated version here) from XA Global Trade Advisors shows that there has been a big increase in the number of open tariff investigations with South Africa’s International Trade Administration Commission (ITAC) since 2020. This reflects increase in the time taken by ITAC, but especially the amount of time ministerial decisions take.
In an earlier post, we summarised the last XA report that showed that 93% of current duties have been in place for more than 20 years and have never been reviewed in that period and that it takes almost 60 months for a tariff application decision in South Africa (compared to a target of 4-6 months), and three times longer than 20 years ago).
