CSO Should Publish Inflation by Income Levels

Just like a number of countries do. In South Africa, for example, they have estimated that the rate of inflation for the poor is about 3% higher than headline inflation. If that's the case here too, then the rate of inflation experienced by the weakest segments of our population has been, on average, 11.5% every year from July 2005 to December 2008. That's almost 6 times the British target if you were wondering.

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?

Tourists Target Not Blazing New Trails

The 2015 target of 2 million tourists means increasing the 761,063 arrivals we got in 2005 by a factor of 2.63 or if you prefer by a little over 10% annually for 10 straight years. This has happened in 5 of the last 22 10-year periods ending December 2007 with the last one occurring for the decade ending December 1996. The average of these 10-year growth factors is 2.27 so that if an average history were to repeat itself we would hit that 2 million mark a little later, sometime in 2017. A few seconds after 13h45 on Friday October 11 to be more precise.