Levies, Tax and the Fuel Price in South Africa

{saffer}R / 3 min read

According to the Automobile Association (AA) the fuel price is the sum of four main components:

  • the basic fuel price
  • the general fuel levy
  • the Road Accident Fund (RAF) levy and
  • wholesale and retail margins, distribution and transport costs.

This article suggests that almost 70% of the fuel price in South Africa is due to taxes and levies.

I used data from {saffer} to examine this assertion.

Fuel Price Data

Load the library.

library(saffer)
packageVersion("saffer")

[1] '0.1.5'

These are the two datasets that I’ll be using:

  • fuel_price and
  • fuel_price_basic.

Let’s take a quick look at their contents. The fuel_price data frame contains the effective fuel price (what you’d pay as a consumer), broken down by date, fuel type and region.

tail(fuel_price, 10)

# A tibble: 10 × 7
    year month   day date       region  fuel                  price
   <int> <chr> <dbl> <date>     <chr>   <fct>                 <dbl>
 1  2021 Dec       1 2021-12-01 inland  93 ULP                2007 
 2  2021 Dec       1 2021-12-01 inland  95 ULP                2019 
 3  2021 Dec       1 2021-12-01 coastal 93 ULP                1945 
 4  2021 Dec       1 2021-12-01 coastal 95 LRP                1957 
 5  2021 Dec       1 2021-12-01 coastal 95 ULP                1957 
 6  2021 Dec       1 2021-12-01 inland  Diesel 0.05%          1792.
 7  2021 Dec       1 2021-12-01 inland  Diesel 0.005%         1798.
 8  2021 Dec       1 2021-12-01 coastal Diesel 0.05%          1731.
 9  2021 Dec       1 2021-12-01 inland  Illuminating Paraffin 1168.
10  2021 Dec       1 2021-12-01 coastal Illuminating Paraffin 1086.

The fuel_price_basic data frame contains the basic fuel price, also broken down by date and fuel type.

tail(fuel_price_basic, 10)

# A tibble: 10 × 4
    year month fuel                  price
   <dbl> <fct> <fct>                 <dbl>
 1  2021 Nov   93 ULP                 925.
 2  2021 Nov   95 ULP                 937.
 3  2021 Nov   Diesel 0.05%           917.
 4  2021 Nov   Diesel 0.005%          921.
 5  2021 Nov   Illuminating Paraffin  912.
 6  2021 Dec   93 ULP                 962.
 7  2021 Dec   95 ULP                 974.
 8  2021 Dec   Diesel 0.05%           956.
 9  2021 Dec   Diesel 0.005%          961.
10  2021 Dec   Illuminating Paraffin  946.

I merged these two sets of data and then filtered out the records for inland 95 ULP since it has the longest history.

Plots

Here’s how the price of 95 ULP has changed over recent decades, decomposed into contributions from the basic fuel price and other costs.

Components of the South African fuel price as a stacked area chart.

Although the basic fuel price has been fairly volatile, changing as a function of exchange rate and crude oil price, the other costs has increased systematically.

The plot below shows the relative contributions of these two components to the total cost of 95 ULP.

Components of the South African fuel price as a (normalised) stacked area chart.

95 ULP was only available at the coast up until December 2005, after which it was only available inland. The figures above represent the price of 95 ULP under both regimes.

It looks like the basic fuel price has hovered at around 50% of the total fuel price. However, recently, the contribution from other costs is higher than that from the basic fuel price. In December 2021 the basic fuel price made up only 48.2 % of the total fuel price.

The figure below shows the distribution of the basic fuel price as a proportion of the total fuel price. The vertical dashed line is the average proportion.

Distribution of the ratio of the basic fuel price to the total fuel price.

Conclusion

Historically the basic fuel price has contributed around 50% of the price of fuel. However, at present other costs are dominating the fuel price.