External trade in the 1990s

Abstract

South Africa's external trade in the 1990s was not transformed in ways comparable to what happened in the political sphere; but the direction of trade was affected by the ending of embargoes, by the new communist dominated government's identification with Third World causes and the Non-Aligned Movement, and by the new global environment that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s Third World countries could no longer play the West against the Soviet Bloc.