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Eight arguments, honestly labelled

This page separates three different kinds of statement and marks each one. Some of what follows is directly attributable and sourced. Some is general industry or economic analysis that stands on its own evidence. Some is editorial interpretation prepared for this website. Conflating the three would be the easiest way to mislead, so we do not.

Verified & attributed Industry & economic context Editorial interpretation

How to read this page

Three labels, applied to every argument below

Verified & attributed

A position stated publicly by Anil C. Currimjee, with the publication and date identified in the text. Direct quotations appear in their original French with an English translation.

Industry & economic context

General analysis of markets, policy or economics that does not depend on any individual’s opinion, supported where relevant by published institutional data.

Editorial interpretation

Argument written for this website. It is our reading of the documented record and is not attributed to Anil C. Currimjee or to any organisation.

The premise

Why a 135-year-old enterprise is a useful place to think about strategy

Most strategic frameworks are written from the outside, by people observing firms over short windows. They tend to reward the visible: the bold entry, the decisive exit, the transformation programme. What they capture poorly is the thing that actually determines whether an enterprise is still trading in eighty years — the accumulation of unspectacular decisions that leave the firm with capacity it has not yet needed.

The Currimjee record offers something unusual: an enterprise with a documented, continuous history through six distinct Mauritian economic regimes. Colonial sugar monoculture. Post-independence import substitution. Export-processing industrialisation. Tourism and offshore financial services. Telecommunications liberalisation. And now a digital and climate-constrained services economy.

No strategy survives all six. What survived was an approach to allocation: enter the sector the country is opening, take a position small enough to be affordable if it fails, hold it long enough for the option to mature, and accept that most of the return will arrive in a decade you cannot forecast from where you are standing.

The eight arguments that follow are organised around that observation. Where a position has been stated publicly, it is quoted and sourced. Where the argument is ours, it says so.

Anil C. Currimjee in a working discussion around a boardroom table
Strategy in a small economy is mostly conducted in rooms like this one — between the private sector and the institutions that regulate it.

01

Industry & economic context

Long-term strategy in an economy that cannot control its own weather

Small open economies are price-takers in almost everything. Mauritius does not set the sugar price, the freight rate, the tourism cycle, the interest rate on its foreign borrowing, or the regulatory posture of the jurisdictions its financial centre serves. Strategy in that setting cannot be about predicting conditions. It has to be about building an enterprise that survives conditions it did not predict.

What that looks like in practice

Sector entries that create optionality rather than commitments: a licence, a partnership, a land holding, a minority stake. The Currimjee record is full of positions that were small when taken and structurally important two decades later — the 1989 mobile licence being the clearest case.

The cost of the approach

Long-horizon allocation looks like underperformance in any given five-year window. A group that had concentrated on the single best-performing Mauritian sector of the 1990s would have shown better returns than one that spread across telecoms, hospitality, FMCG and insurance — right up until that sector turned.

02

Editorial interpretation

Governance as competitive infrastructure, not compliance overhead

The conventional framing treats governance as a cost: audit fees, board time, disclosure obligations. For a small jurisdiction that sells trust as its principal export, the framing is exactly backwards. Institutional quality is the product.

The national version

Mauritius does not compete for international financial services business on tax rates alone — other jurisdictions can match or beat them. It competes on the credibility of its courts, its regulator, its accounting standards and its treaty network. Every erosion of that credibility is a direct reduction in the value of the export.

The corporate version

The same logic operates inside a firm. Listing 25% of Emtel in July 2024 imposed continuous disclosure, an external shareholder register and market pricing on a business the family had built alone for thirty-five years. That is a governance cost. It is also the mechanism by which the business becomes financeable by parties who will never meet the family.

03

Verified & attributed

Wages, productivity and the arithmetic nobody enjoys

This is the most contested position taken during the Business Mauritius presidency, and it was stated plainly and repeatedly: wage increases must be accompanied by a corresponding conversation about productivity.

The position as stated

In a published interview headline, the formulation was direct: « Les hausses salariales doivent être suivies par une réflexion sur la productivité. » He also opposed a salary adjustment that, in his account, was imposed outside the legal framework and for electoral reasons — while explicitly supporting higher wages and stronger purchasing power in principle. He later characterised the matter as having been resolved in the organisation’s favour, and described that outcome as a victory for the rule of law.

Why the arithmetic binds

Unit labour cost is wages divided by output per worker. If the numerator rises and the denominator does not, the cost of producing anything in the country rises relative to competitors. For a domestic-only business that is an inflation question; for an export sector competing against other jurisdictions it is an existence question. This is not an ideological claim — it is the reason productivity growth, not wage restraint, is the sustainable route to higher real pay.

04

Verified & attributed

Openness to skills the country does not yet produce

A labour force drawn from a population of roughly 1.26 million cannot supply every emerging sector simultaneously. The public position taken on this was unambiguous.

The position as stated

In a cover interview with Business Magazine, the headline formulation was: « Le pays a besoin de compétences étrangères pour développer les secteurs émergents. » — “The country needs foreign skills to develop the emerging sectors.” The attraction and retention of talent was one of the four axes set out at the start of the presidency, and the closing assessment of the mandate warned that regulatory signals risk discouraging the openness the economy requires.

The structural argument

Imported skills are usually described as competing with local workers. In an economy trying to stand up sectors that do not yet exist domestically — specialist fintech, AI engineering, actuarial work, advanced medical services — there is no local incumbent to displace. The realistic alternative to importing the skill is not local employment; it is the sector not existing, and the downstream local jobs it would have created not existing either.

05

Verified & attributed

Innovation cadence, and the Singapore comparison

Business Mauritius contributed to “AI for All”, the country’s first national artificial intelligence plan. The assessment offered at the end of the mandate was not celebratory.

The position as stated

The point made was one of pace rather than direction: Singapore adopted two successive national AI plans within a few years, and Mauritius needs to accelerate, strengthening digital connectivity and the fintech environment alongside the plan itself. Singapore was cited explicitly as a reference for meritocracy, pragmatism that combines ideology with realism, civic values of discipline, work, equity and transparency, and a frontal approach to corruption with the resolve to investigate and sanction unequivocally — the argument being that governance and economic development are inseparable.

Why cadence matters more than content

National technology plans are not scarce; most economies have one. What separates outcomes is the interval between plan and implementation, and the willingness to publish a second plan that supersedes the first before the first has finished being celebrated. A single plan held for a decade is a signal of institutional slowness, not of strategic conviction.

06

Verified & attributed

Climate resilience as a balance-sheet item

Climate change and the energy transition were the first of the four axes set out at the start of the presidency, and coastal erosion was named repeatedly as a live economic exposure rather than an environmental abstraction.

What was actually built

The alignment described at the end of the mandate — between the state, businesses, NGOs and development partners, on the basis of scientific data and concrete solutions — was characterised as unprecedented, and identified as one of the two pieces of work considered most durable. The other was the elevation of the port as a strategic economic lever.

Why an island cannot externalise this

A continental economy can retreat inland. An island cannot. Beach loss is direct revenue loss for a tourism sector that recorded 1.44 million arrivals in 2025; reef degradation removes the wave attenuation that protects the coast behind it; a single severe cyclone can compress a quarter of GDP. Resilience spending is therefore not philanthropy — it is the insurance premium on the productive asset base.

07

Verified & attributed

Small and medium enterprises, and the federation problem

Asked at the close of the mandate what he would have pursued with more time, the answer was specific: bringing Business Mauritius closer to SMEs, whose dynamism he identified as vital.

The structural difficulty

Employers’ federations everywhere are dominated by their largest members, because large members have the staff to attend the working groups where the technical work happens. The result is an organisation whose formal mandate covers the whole private sector but whose agenda reflects the concerns of the firms that can afford to show up. Naming this as unfinished business is more useful than claiming it had been solved.

Why it matters for the economy

Small firms are where net job creation and sectoral experimentation concentrate. If the institutional channel between the state and the private sector is calibrated to large employers, policy will systematically over-weight the constraints large firms face — regulatory complexity, tax treatment — and under-weight the ones small firms face, which are usually access to finance, payment terms and administrative burden per employee.

08

Editorial interpretation

The port, the region, and where the next decade of trade sits

Elevating Port Louis as a strategic economic lever was named as one of the achievements of the presidency. The reasoning behind that priority is worth setting out, because it is not obvious from outside.

Geography as an asset class

Mauritius sits on the sea route between Asia and the east coast of Africa, in a region where transhipment capacity is scarce and where east-African trade volumes have been growing faster than the continental average. A port that can bunker, tranship and add value is a very different national asset from a port that only lands imports for domestic consumption.

The crossroads formulation

The closing framing of the mandate was that Mauritius should embrace its position at a crossroads — positioned to perceive uncertainty in the West while sensing momentum in the East and in Africa. Whether that positioning is realised depends less on geography, which is fixed, than on port capacity, customs efficiency and the connectivity that lets a cargo decision be made in Port Louis rather than around it.

Sources for attributed positions on this page: Le Mauricien, 28 September 2023; Defi Media; Business Magazine cover interview; Business Mauritius / L’Express end-of-mandate interview, 1 October 2025. Tourism figure: African Development Bank and World Bank reporting for 2025. Population figure: World Bank.

Anil C. Currimjee at a Business Mauritius budget briefing with the national budget speech document
Budget engagement is the most concrete point of contact between the private sector and economic policy.
Editorial interpretation

What holds the eight arguments together

Read in sequence, the positions above share one structural feature: each treats a soft variable as a hard constraint. Governance is treated as a production input rather than a compliance chore. Productivity is treated as the binding limit on real wages rather than a management slogan. Skills availability is treated as a physical constraint on which sectors can exist. Climate exposure is treated as a claim on the balance sheet. Institutional pace is treated as a competitiveness variable in its own right.

That is a recognisable intellectual posture, and it is the posture of someone whose enterprise has had to survive six economic regimes. Soft variables are exactly the ones that destroy long-lived firms, because they degrade slowly enough that no single year’s accounts register the loss.

It also explains the discomfort some of these positions attract. Arguing that wages cannot outrun productivity, or that a country must import skills it has not yet trained, is arguing for a constraint that voters and workers would reasonably prefer did not exist. Whether one agrees with the conclusions, the arguments have the merit of being falsifiable and of having been stated on the record rather than in private.

See the underlying data

The economic evidence base

Mauritius & Growth sets out the published figures behind these arguments — growth, tourism, employment, governance scores and sector composition — with each series attributed to its publishing institution.

Mauritius & growth Read the insights