Monetary policy  As already indicated considerable success was achieved with the monetary policy measures during the past year and CPIX inflation has been within the target range since September 2003. This has allowed the SA Reserve Bank to keep the repo rate at an unchanged level of 8 percent per annum in 2004.
The major threats to the inflation target in this year have come mainly from exogenous factors. At first the drought experienced in the country was regarded as an important risk because of the negative implications that it could have had on food prices in general.