THE IMPACT of the CHINESE TEXTILE IMPORTS on EMPLOYMENT and VALUE ADDED in the TEXTILE INDUSTRY of the SOUTH AFRICAN ECONOMY

With the increased trade linkage between China and African economies, this paper endeavours to assess the dynamic impacts of Chinese textile imports on employment and value added in the South African textile industry. This paper makes use of the structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) methodology with sign restriction. Moreover, based on this methodology, this paper conducts a counterfactual analysis to uncover what would have happened to employment and value added trends in the South African textile industry in the absence of trade with China. The results of the empirical analysis show that total employment responds negatively to shocks to import from China. Moreover, the results of the counterfactual analysis show that the South African economy could perform better without textile imports from China.