Swaziland’s labor force is split between two dominant sectors, agriculture and services. Some 39 percent of its workforce engaged in crop or livestock production, while another 38 percent hold service jobs. The country's economy is tied to that of South Africa through trade and currency links, and can rise or fall depending on the fortunes of its large neighbor. Gross domestic product in 1999 was $1.2 billion, or an average of $1,200 per person. About three-quarters of the population live on Swazi national land, most cultivating staple crops of maize or herding livestock. The country's most productive farmland, however, are the tracts in private hands, which produce about 75 percent of the country's exports. Chief cash crops are sugarcane grown on irrigated land, cotton, citrus fruits, and pineapples. Livestock includes 665,000 cattle and 440,000 goats. Swaziland also has an important forestry industry.

Overall, the economy displays a marked duality of large-scale intensive production and small-scale semi-subsistence activities. This produces a great contrast in incomes and living standards, which tends to be obscured by average per capita statistics. National economic policy is based on the free enterprise or market philosophy, with fiscal measures to redistribute resources to education, health, and community improvement projects. Government revenue is derived principally from receipts from the Southern African Customs Union, sales tax, and corporate and personal taxation. The budget is generally in balance, but foreign aid is a major contributor to the capital or development budget, providing a buffer to help meet any deficit in revenue. Nevertheless, the dual economy persists, and the formal employment sector is unable to absorb the annual increment of new workers generated by the country's high population growth rate. Many workers, mostly men, are forced to seek employment as migrant workers, predominantly in South Africa. Labour relations in the country are at an embryonic stage, with a generally fragmented trade union movement pitted against a longer-established employers' association and with the government endeavouring to act as referee and arbiter.

In this small landlocked economy, subsistence agriculture occupies more than 60% of the population. Manufacturing features a number of agroprocessing factories. Mining has declined in importance in recent years: diamond mines have shut down because of the depletion of easily accessible reserves; high-grade iron ore deposits were depleted by 1978; and health concerns have cut world demand for asbestos. Exports of soft drink concentrate, sugar, and wood pulp are the main earners of hard currency. Surrounded by South Africa, except for a short border with Mozambique, Swaziland is heavily dependent on South Africa from which it receives four-fifths of its imports and to which it sends two-thirds of its exports. Remittances from the Southern African Customs Union and Swazi workers in South African mines substantially supplement domestically earned income. The government is trying to improve the atmosphere for foreign investment. Overgrazing, soil depletion, drought, and sometimes floods persist as problems for the future. Prospects for 2001 are strengthened by government millennium projects for a new convention center, additional hotels, an amusement park, a new airport, and stepped-up roadbuilding and factory construction plans.