Speaking at the 14th National Business Conference (NBC) on Monday, James Jessamine chronicled that by Mauritius’ independence in 1968, his country had very low levels of income, low population and just like Botswana depended on a single commodity, sugar. As a country, Jessamine said they paused and moved forward with economic strategies that could take the country out of the woods.
One of the approaches was to set up export processing zones (EPZs) and therefore companies from as far as Hong Kong, India, China, France, the United Kingdom and others took advantage of the conducive environment and set up there and in the process grew the economy. In the end, Mauritius prides itself in the fact that EPZs were able to have an annual turnarover of about $1.1 billion and created about 100,000 jobs in a country that is experiencing unemployment of about 10%. A number of local companies also grew in Mauritius because of the enabling environment as the government was concerned with aiding the growth of the economy through supportive legislation. “Tourism industry experienced a boom as today about 1.5 million people visit Mauritius annually from the lucrative European Union (EU) market,” said Jessamine.
