Investigating the lingering effects of the pandemic on wholesale industry sales in South Africa

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the South African total monthly wholesale trade sales using time series Box-Jenkins methodology. The SARIMA(2,1,1)(0,1,1)12 model provides the best fit to the SA’s total monthly wholesale trade sales series as it has the lowest Akaike’s information criterion, Bayesian information criterion, root mean square error and mean absolute percentage error values which serve as model selection and model adequacy metrics. The findings of this study show that the South African wholesale industry trade sales were negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic but have fully recovered.