December 2022 BCI shows stagnation in SA’s economy

The local economy has continued to show signs of stagnation in December 2022.

This is indicated in the composite leading business cycle indicator for the last month of 2022.

The South African Reserve Bank released the December BCI (business cycle indicator) which shows a 2.1% decrease.

The leading business cycle indicator provides early signals of the direction in which real economic activity is moving, in real-time.

The decrease was broad-based across all nine available component time series.

The largest negative contributors were a decrease in the number of residential building plans approved and a deceleration in the six-months smoothed growth rate of job advertisement space.

At the same time, the composite coincident business cycle indicator increased by 0.2% in November due to an increase in retail and new vehicle sales as well as industrial production.