The Economic Contribution of the Ocean Sector in South Africa

The contribution of the ocean sector in South Africa is of interest to many - from researchers of ocean resources and environments to firms using the ocean and government departments and nongovernmental organizations with interest in, or responsibility for, the ocean resources and environment. For the purpose of identifying the overall economic contribution this paper describes and applies alternative methods of apportioning GDP into ocean and non-ocean parts. One method uses ocean closeness as the reference for apportioning GDP. It has been estimated that in 1995 the ocean sector contributed about 33% of South Africa's GDP. A major weakness of the closeness to ocean basis for apportioning GDP is that many of the economic activities taking place near to the ocean use little, if anything, of the ocean resources and its environment as inputs in production. A preferred method of identifying ocean and non-ocean parts of GDP is to divide the value added per economic sub-sector (and sub-set) into ocean and non-ocean parts and summing the ocean parts. This method is outlined and demonstrated using South African data for the 2010 year at the third digit level of the standard industrial classification code list (ICCL or SIC). It is found that in 2010 the overall contribution of the ocean-linked sector to GDP was about 4.4 per cent.