The resilience of South African citrus, in an era of persistent global crises: Impulse Response application

Two major global disruptions comprising of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Russia and Ukraine, reignited scholarly interest on the subject of resilience. Economists are concerned about industries’ capacity to withstand unexpected disruptions. In this paper the resilience of South African citrus industry is studied. Based on availability of data, a secondary monthly time series data, was sourced from the International Trade Map. The volumes of orange supplied to world markets, was held as a dependent variable. Using an E-views software, VECM and impulse response were employed as empirical models to study resilience. The cointegration results shows that there a high speed of adjustment towards equilibrium. This signifies the capacity of the citrus industry to recover in an event of global disruption. VECM results has established a long-run relationship between the supply of orange and orange export-price. The VECM results, shows that for a percentage change in the orange export-price, the supply increases by 133%. This is significant at less than 5% p-value. The model fits well with R-square of 98% and F statistics of less than 5%. The impulse response function results, shows that the local citrus industry has capacity to recover quickly from global shocks and continue to supply orange to world markets. Among others this is because of the efficient coordination efforts of the CGA. The results provides insight for decision-making and policy for supporting citrus exports. It is recommended for the efficient coordination efforts of the CGA to be extended to smallholder citrus farmers.