Showing posts with label Dubai. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dubai. Show all posts

Sunday, April 9, 2017

Why Mauritius Has No Money For Capital Budgets

It's not really because of the capital projects undertaken by the previous Government namely the new airport terminal and the ring road. And the sums that may be needed to rehabilitate them. The main reason is the regressive flat tax and the extensive damage that has been done to the economy to keep it at 15%. There was 927 billion of GDP missing at the end of 2016 -- aka the Sithanen toohrooh -- and if we assume that government would have reduced its revenue as a share of GDP to 15% it's missing 139 billion rupees. If it kept it at 20% then there's 185 billion rupees of government revenue missing.

What can you buy with Rs185 billion? Something like the Dubai metro or the one considered by the city which pioneered the bus rapid transit (BRT). But we don't need that kind of metro although we should have been able to afford it were it not for a massive ministerial skills mismatch. We don't need a scaled down version of the Metro Leger either simply because the flat tax has placed our public finances on an unsustainable track. There are better and urgent ways of handling the traffic Frankenstein.

Even more urgent is to restore some sanity to our public finances. Not a bad idea as how can Lepep deliver an economic miracle in year 4 when it cannot organically generate money for capital budgets 12 months before?

Monday, February 23, 2009

Why China is Unlikely To Use Mauritius As a Base to Hop Into Africa

I'll give you three reasons. The first one is because it's already everywhere in Africa and has been absolutely irreverent in not waiting for the go-ahead from the bean-counter. Google about it when you have two secs. The second one is geography. Africa is not very far from China and that has not changed for a good many years if you ask me. Besides we're only the 15th busiest airport in Africa as far as passenger traffic goes (Tunisia has two airports ranked at 10th and 11th places) while Singapore and Dubai have the 11th and 13th busiest airport by cargo traffic in the World. Finally, we are stuck with the dumbest government in our history which also has more than a little penchant for cronyism.