 There's an old view of trade, which was that trade was governed by industries. How we think about trade is different to what it is before. And part of that relates to this idea of what is a product, what is a good. So take the German car. When you drive a German car in Australia, the BMW M3, you think this is a German car. In fact, that car comes from South Africa. When you unpack it a little bit further, that's also not a South African product. Although it was assembled and a lot of the production occurred in South Africa, the components, the inputs that were used in that production process actually come from other countries as well. So the steel may come from South Africa, but the glass comes from abroad. So this idea of a good being South African or the idea of a good being German no longer works in the current world environment. Some inputs come from domestic firms, but a lot of inputs actually come from abroad. There's a strong concern, we see it emerging in America as well, this concern that competition, international competition, drives out domestic firms. It causes the deindustrialization of manufacturing and it results in job losses and manufacturing job losses, but the angle I think that's been missed and is often missed is the role that imported intermediate inputs play in complimenting domestic production. So when we actually look at what we import, for example in South Africa, most of our inputs that we bring in are made up out of intermediate inputs and they're made up of capital goods. These are core components to the production process, which suggests that domestic firms rely on this international environment to access key inputs that allow them actually to produce their output. So what we're interested in, we were trying to focus on is this complementary relationship between access to international intermediate inputs and production, to try and balance the story about competition and competitive effects of international trade. We were able to follow 20,000 manufacturing firms over a four-year period, so it gives us a lot of depth across firms and a reasonable time period to try and understand how firms are interacting with this international environment. Our focus is on the relationship between imported intermediate inputs and firm outcomes like productivity and export performance. So the critical relationship is the access to the imported intermediate inputs. So we find a couple of very strong relationships. They are associations, but the first association we find is that firms that import intermediate inputs directly tend to be much bigger. They pay higher wages, they employ more labour and most crucially for our first question is they tend to be more productive. The second key relationship that we find is that exporters that import intermediate inputs tend to export more. They export more varieties, they export to more destinations and they export more products. So there's a very strong correlation and association between firm export performance and firm's import behaviour. Our finding challenges the sort of standard discourse within South Africa at least and somewhat globally that imports are destructive for jobs and are destructive for firm performance. We tend to find that access to imports is a critical component of firm outcomes, particularly productivity and exports.