South Africa’s foreign reserves have increased from under USD2 billion in the mid-1980s to over USD60 billion currently. The ratio of reserves to external debt has fallen relative to its pre-global financial crisis level, although the ratio to imports has been at a broadly similar level for the most recently available data from the IMF. In earlier posts we compared the level of South Africa’s reserves to other countries, which stand at around 15% of GDP, a comparable level to Brazil and India.
