How Mauritius Can Increase Its GDP By 50%

Remove all sugar cane and replace it with the kind of stuff we have on the other two-thirds of our land area. That would boost our GDP – and the per capita number as shown in the above chart – by almost half. And get us out of the middle-income group after being trapped there for almost three decades.

No, no, no you say. Sugar has a bright future. Really? Then let's raze all of our towns and grow sugar cane and shrink GDP by 98% or USD11.8bn. That would collapse our GDP per capita to $283 or a level close to that of South Sudan – a country which has been in civil war since 2013. We'd probably experience the same thing if we reverted back to being a mono crop. It'd take a less extreme scenario to have people in the streets. That's for sure.