Tens of Billions of FDI Later, Jobless Rate Still in Double Digits

Unemployment is expected to have ended 2009 at 10.8% up by 0.4% from its level of a year before. That's kind of strange given that Mauritius received more than Rs6 billion in the first three quarters of last year. And that followed two years of Rs11 billion each.

In fact the jobless rate has stayed above 10% over the past 4.5 years. That's very surprising because the Rs40 billion FDI that has poured into Mauritius over that period is a massive amount which even under a mediocre type of economic management should have pulled down the unemployment rate much closer to the ground and made everyone richer.

Nothing of the sort happened: the poor got hit with record inflation and the savings rate is at a 30-year low.

BOI Misses Targets

The Rs15 billion of foreign direct investment target that Raju Jaddoo has set for 2009 is in fact the target Sithanen had for 2008 (see paragraph 9 of the 2008/09 budget). As only Rs11.4 billion poured in last year, the BOI fell short by about a quarter.

The other target that Sithanen/Jaddoo had was to rank Mauritius in the Top 10 places of the oversold (see here) World Bank's Doing Business survey in 2009. That didn't happen either: Mauritius clocked only a 24th place. In fact the best ranking we ever achieved in that survey was a notch higher and it happened, as the table above shows, before the bean-counting reform of Mansoor/Sithanen.

Finally, why do we have to borrow Rs600 million in USD from the World Bank for some dumb project called Mauritius Economic Transition Project when Government has been awash with cash from overtaxing us for so long? Who exactly benefits from Mauritius being saddled by Sithanen and Mansoor with all these billions of rupees worth of loans in foreign currency?