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This paper examines the long run effects of the exchange rate changes on export volumes in South Africa under the inflation targeting period using the Johansen cointegration and the Engle-Granger approaches. This paper further examines whether the 2007 global financial crisis, rising government debt, and cost of credit post 2008Q4 impacted the magnitudes of determinants of export volumes. Both tests confirm a long run relationship amongst export volumes, exchange rate, and foreign income. The long run exchange rate impacts are bigger than the short run effects. Foreign income demand has bigger impact on export volumes than the exchange rate. Evidence shows that 2007 global financial crisis reduced the impact of the exchange rate depreciation on export volumes but increased the impact of the foreign income demand. This suggests relying on the exchange rate as a policy tool alone to achieve the external adjustment may not raise export volumes. The global financial crisis exacerbated the adverse effects of the exchange rate volatility on the export volumes, indicating that policymakers should implement policies that limit the exchange rate volatility. The adverse effects of the global financial crisis on export volumes were transmitted more via the consumer prices rather than the exchange rate, suggesting that South Africa lost its price competitiveness during the crisis period. Rising government debt and the cost of credit post 2008Q4 are transmitted more via the exchange rate than relative price ratios to reduce export volumes. The exchange rate volatility channel does not transmit the rising government debt shocks to export volumes., Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43546-022-00217-2., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestI declare that there is no conflict of interest., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.)

This paper examines the long-run and short-run effects of the exchange rate changes on the net trade balance in South Africa and compares the effects to those induced by the foreign and domestic price and income effects. Using annual data from 1970 to 2019 and the autoregressive distributed lags bounds testing approach, evidence shows that the long-run elasticities of the exchange rate on the net trade balance are bigger than the short-run impacts. In both the short run and long run, the impact of domestic income on the net trade balance is the biggest followed by consumer prices and then last is the nominal effective exchange rate. The long-run impact of the domestic income is nearly double that of the exchange rate. This shows that domestic income has a bigger effect on the net trade balance than both the price levels and the exchange rate effects. These results imply that policymakers designing the exchange rate policy should complement this with an appropriate industrial policy which emphasises the value of import-substituting industries to eliminate the net trade deterioration. At the same time, the design of the inflation targeting framework matters. Hence, there is a need to pursue import-substitution strategies to strengthen the domestic industrial base with all the associated multiplier effects throughout the economy and this contributes to the reduction of the worsening trade deficits., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG part of Springer Nature 2021.)

Rivers are now facing increasing pressure and demand to provide water directly for drinking, farming and supporting industries as a result of rapidly growing global human population. Globally, the most common practice for catchment managers is to limit water abstraction and changes to stream flow by setting environmental flow standards that guard and maintain the natural ecosystem characteristics. Since the development of the environmental flow concept and methods in South Africa, very few studies have assessed the institutional constraints towards environmental flow implementation. This study determined stream flow trends over time by fitting simple linear regression model to mean daily stream flow data at three selected stations in the Luvuvhu River Catchment (LRC). We also conducted a literature search to review, firstly the response of aquatic organisms (fish and macroinvertebrate) to changes in habitat conditions and secondly on local challenges affecting the sustainable implementation of environmental flow regime and related water resources management strategies. All the three stream flow stations show decreasing stream flow volume of 1 and 2 orders of magnitude faster in some stations with the possibility that flow will cease in the near future. Qualitative analyses from both local and international literature search found that the main challenges facing the implementation of sustainable flow strategies and management are absence of catchment management agency, lack of understanding of environmental flow benefits, limited financial budget, lack of capacity and conflict of interest. Rivers with changing stream flows tend to lose sensitive species. The development of scientifically credible catchment-wide environmental flow and abstraction thresholds for rivers within the LRC would make a major contribution in minimizing the declining stream flow volumes. Monitoring and reporting should be prioritized to give regular accounts of the state of our rivers.