Public Policy and Transformation in South Africa after Democratisation otherwise have as non-discrimination.The SDT principle is based on the concept of substantial equality which ensures the equality of opportunity for developing countries in spite of differential level of development between developed countries and developing countries.The SDT principle allows developing countries to have flexibility in their trade policy and to get preferential treatments from developed countries 3 .South Africa changed its status in the GATT /WTO from being a developed country to a developing country when a new democratic government was born in 1994.Only South Africa, in the history of the GATT/WTO, has changed its status in this way.Did this particularity of South Africa affect its trade policy?If so, how?This chapter, therefore, examines South African trade policy by focusing on the interactions between South Africa's trade policy and the WTO.After the introductory section, Section 1 looks at trade policy during the democratic transition period, which greatly influenced the future direction of South Africa's trade policy.Section 2 deals with the WTO commitments that South Africa has to implement domestically, while Section 3 discusses the country's attitude toward the WTO.The final section provides a summary of the chapter. D EMOCRATIC TRANSITION PERIODSouth Africa was a founding member of the GATT, which was signed in 1947.It also participated in the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, which was held to agree upon a series of new rules for the post-World War II international monetary system. 4During this period, South Africa was considered a "western" state (Erasmus 2005: 352) and was expected to play a leading role in international economic stability in the postwar world.South Africa itself actively worked in the GATT to strengthen the open world trading system by eliminating discriminatory trading blocs.However, the racial discrimination policy, apartheid, made South Africa suffer from both multilateral and bilateral sanctions, which isolated it from international society for a long time.South Africa was barred from participation in international organisations and conferences.For example, in 1974, the United Nations General Assembly suspended South Africa from participation in its work, due to international opposition to the policy of apartheid.S Rarely for international organisations, South Africa could keep its seat in the GATT and participated in multilateral trade negotiations even though it was not an 3 Within the WTO legal system, SDT has taken two main forms: provisions providing preferential access for developing country exports to the markets of developed countries and provisions allowing for a modulation of commitments by different types of member (IISD 2003).The principle of SDT is designed to promote developing countries' integration into the WTO system by granting them preferential treatment.4 It participated in the conference as the Union of South Africa.5 To be exact, the President of the General Assembly ruled that the South African delegation to the General Assembly could not continue to participate in the work of the Twenty-Nine Session of the Assembly because the delegation's credentials had not been accepted by the Assembly.All other organs in the United Nations derive their membership through election by the Gene.ral Assembly.Therefore, South Africa could not work in any of these organs (Jhabvala 1977: 615-617).South Africa was re-admitted to the UN in 1994 following its transition to a democracy.
Yanai Akiko (Tue,) studied this question.