How Much Sleep Should You Lose Over The Doing Business Rankings?

None. See, it's not correlated with any of our national priorities. But we just lost 3 spots I hear a few of you say. Indeed, but that's 3 times less than the 9 spots we lost back in 2007, the year of the... ahem... early harvest. Still, given that we don't want our friends at the Joint Economic Council to do anything foolish during the week-end here's something to cheer them up: Mauritius has moved up 50 places in the Logistics Performance Index in the last few years from a miserable 132nd spot. By the way, if you average out our rank in these two indices you end up with 52.5 which is very close to our 54th place in the recently published 2011-2012 Global Competitiveness Report. Which is a more comprehensive yardstick.

Sleep tight.

Why The Stimulus Package Didn't Save 4,700 Jobs

First of all Sithanen claims that the economy has created some 40,000 jobs since July 2005. That's roughly 8,000 jobs per year. If our economy is creating jobs this fast then we didn't need to save any because it would have created 4,700 jobs in 7 short months -- about 700 jobs every month.

Secondly, did these companies need to be saved? Does not paying your rent for several years although you operate in a booming industry related to the global financial meltdown?

Thirdly, didn't we hear a few greedy bosses wanting stimulus money but indecently saying at the same time that they didn't guarantee they could save any job. We've also heard worse than that.

So for all of this I am not buying into the argument that the stimulus package saved nearly 5,000 jobs. You shouldn't either.

Isn't it Ironic?

About nine years ago a chairman of the CEB declared that the public utility didn't have the financial means to expand so that it would have to rely on private capital. That reliance translated into the fleecing of its customers as the CEB ended up, quite conveniently for some, buying power at uncompetitive prices. At about the same time our government offered its guarantee without which the infamous Illovo deal wouldn't have gone through.

Fastforward to the present and a section of the private sector now wants taxpayers' money to apparently stay afloat and to avoid having to sack people and they don't guarantee that they will not eliminate jobs even if they get saved by government. That's of course after the rupee was depreciated from twenty-five to the USD to about 35, interest rates were cut and corporate tax rates were slashed. And the Joint Economic Council is now going to ask for help just in case they might need it.

What do you make of all this Alanis?