Western Cape Economy

The Western Cape’s total GDP is the third-highest contribution to the country’s total, at 14.6%. The largest industry is the clothing and textile industry, which employs over 170,000 people. The textile industry is presently declining in importance, due to competition with cheaper Eastern producers, such as China. High-tech industries, international call centres, fashion design, advertising and TV production are niche industries rapidly gaining in importance. The province also has a substantially lower unemployment rate than the other provinces; 17.1% of the working population is unemployed.

The province has recently grown a massive tourism industry, with the majority of international tourist arrivals visiting the province, with Cape Town, Garden Route and the Winelands being popular tourist destinations. There were 1,535,903 international arrivals in 2004 with continued growth annually. Domestic tourism is also on the rise, as low-cost air carriers such as Kulula and 1Time making travel more affordable to more South Africans.

South African Rand

The rand (sign: R; code: ZAR) is the currency of South Africa. It takes its name from the Witwatersrand (White-waters-ridge in English), the ridge upon which Johannesburg is built and where most of South Africa's gold deposits were found. The rand has the symbol "R" and is subdivided into 100 cents, symbol "c". The ISO 4217 code is ZAR, from Dutch Zuid-Afrikaanse rand.[1]

The rand is the currency of the Common Monetary Area between South Africa, Namibia, Swaziland and Lesotho.

The first series of rand banknotes was introduced in 1961 in denominations of 1, 2, 10 and 20 rand, with similar designs and colours to the preceding pound notes to ease the transition. They bore the image of Jan van Riebeeck, the first V.O.C. administrator of Cape Town. Like the last pound notes, they came in two variants, one with English written first and the other with Afrikaans written first. This practice was continued in the 1966 series which included the first 5 rand notes but did not include the 20 rand denomination.

The 1978 series began with denominations of 2, 5 and 10 rand, with 20 and 50 rand introduced in 1984. This series saw a major design change. In addition, the series has only one variant for each denomination of note. Afrikaans was the first language on the 2, 10 and 50 rand, while English was the first language on 5 and 20 rand. The notes bore the image of Jan van Riebeeck.

In the 1990s, the notes were redesigned with images of the Big Five wildlife species. With the 2 and 5 rand coins replacing notes, notes were introduced in 1994 for 100 and 200 rand.

The 2005 series has the same principal design, but with additional security features such as colour shifting ink on the 50 rand and higher and the EURion constellation. The obverses of all denominations are printed in English, while two other languages are printed on the reverses, making all eleven official languages of South Africa available.