Information technology to fuel growth

The government of Mauritius, one of the region’s economic success stories, is planning to make the Indian Ocean island an information technology mecca, ‘Business Day’ reported on Monday. For the past 20 years, Mauritius, with a population of 1.2 million has had an average growth rate of 5.4 percent, which far outstrips that of most African countries. The island’s unemployment rate is 8.7 percent, well below South Africa’s official rate of nearly 26 percent. Paul Béranger, deputy prime minister and finance minister, says the next step is a “quantum leap” to “a knowledge island”.

Part of the plan involves creating “cyber cities” which would help reduce the country’s still heavy dependence on sugar and manufactured exports. The plan relies on large-scale public spending, although the budget deficit is sizeable. Despite the high budget deficit, government has plans for what Béranger says are “massive investments”, mainly in infrastructure, training, housing, and communications. “We are going to move to the next stage of economic development”, that of an “information, knowledge, and services economy”, he said.

A number of Indian and Mauritian information technology firms are operating in the country already and the hope is to attract “call centres” to the island. In luring investment, the government is playing on the country’s bilingual advantage as the bulk of the population are able to speak French and English. In time there could also be advantages associated with the large portions of the population who are fluent in Hindi and Mandarin. The pressure to move into the knowledge economy has arisen partly because of the increasing environmental constraints on tourism development.