The major advantage for South Africa is, of course, that the scarce sources of finance for economic development can be supplemented with increasing amounts of foreign funds. Savings of more developed countries are therefore transferred to South Africa to supplement domestic saving.
The large inflow of funds over the past four years enabled the Reserve Bank to increase the country’s official foreign reserves from a small to a more acceptable amount of R33 billion, which is sufficient to cover about three month’s imports of goods.