The ongoing changes in China’s economy present new opportunities for African countries that now mainly export raw materials and oil to the Asian nation, according to the Trade Law Centre for Southern Africa.
“As Chinese domestic aggregate demand shifts from investment goods to household consumption and implicitly towards services, [African] exporters of food and services can gain from [the] rebalancing,” said the think tank in a report released earlier this month.
“It is therefore imperative for African countries to diversify exports, or move up the value chain,” to offset the impact of reduced demand for African raw materials and the fall in international prices of commodities, stated the document.
Figures from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database for 2014 put Angola as the second largest source of China’s imports from Africa, providing 27 percent of the total. Only South Africa had a larger share of China’s African imports, providing 39 percent. Nearly 100 percent of China’s imports from Angola consisted of crude oil and petroleum gas.
