Ask a chief financial officer what governance costs and you will get a number: audit fees, board remuneration, compliance headcount, the internal time absorbed by disclosure. Ask what it produces and the answer becomes vaguer, usually resolving into risk avoided — a negative quantity that is difficult to book.
This asymmetry is the root of a persistent analytical error. Governance is treated as a cost centre because its costs are legible and its returns are not. For most firms in most economies that error is survivable. For a small jurisdiction whose principal export is trust, it is fatal, because there the institutional quality is the product.
What Mauritius actually sells
Financial services accounted for 11.9% of Mauritian GDP in 2023, within a services sector that made up 77% of the economy in 2024. Those numbers describe fund administration, corporate structuring, cross-border investment routing, arbitration and the professional services that surround them.
None of it is a physical product. A fund domiciled in Port Louis is not there because of geography, cost, or proximity to its underlying assets. It is there because of a specific bundle: a legal system that international counsel can read, courts whose judgments are predictable, a regulator whose decisions can be anticipated, accounting standards that auditors elsewhere recognise, and a treaty network that gives the structure legal effect in the jurisdictions where the money actually works.
Every element of that bundle is an institution. Not one of them can be produced by a company, priced by a market, or bought in from abroad. A jurisdiction either has them or does not, and the process of acquiring them takes decades.
The replaceability test
The useful question for any jurisdiction is: if we lost this attribute, could a competitor supply it? Tax rate — yes, trivially; another jurisdiction can legislate a lower one next session. Cost base — yes; there are cheaper places. Time zone — partially. Legal certainty accumulated over decades of consistent judicial behaviour — no. That is why the last one is the asset and the first is a commodity.
The depreciation problem
Institutional capital has a property that makes it dangerous to manage: it depreciates invisibly and repairs slowly.
A factory that is not maintained shows rust. A court system whose independence is being eroded shows nothing measurable for years, because the cases that would reveal the problem are precisely the cases that stop being brought. By the time the deterioration is legible in an index or a capital flow, the underlying damage is a decade old and the rebuild is a decade away.
The Mauritian data offers a mild version of this. In the 2024 Ibrahim Index of African Governance, Mauritius scored 72.8 out of 100 and ranked second of 54 African countries. That is an objectively strong outcome. But the country held first place for several consecutive years before Seychelles moved ahead from 2020. Second of fifty-four would be an excellent result for almost any economy on the continent. For the one whose comparative advantage is institutional quality specifically, it is a signal that requires a response rather than a defence.
A jurisdiction that competes on institutions cannot treat a slipping governance score the way a manufacturer treats a slipping quality rating. For the manufacturer it is a problem in the process. Here it is a problem in the product.Editorial analysis
Where this became concrete: wages, law and the rule of the framework
The most instructive recent episode is the contested salary adjustment of 2024. The substance of the dispute — whether wages should rise, and by how much — is a normal distributive question on which reasonable people disagree.
The governance question was different, and it was the one Business Mauritius pursued under the presidency of Anil C. Currimjee. The objection, as he set it out at the close of his mandate, was that the adjustment had been imposed outside the established legal framework and for electoral reasons — while he supported higher wages and stronger purchasing power in principle. When the matter was resolved in the organisation’s favour he characterised the outcome not as a commercial win but as a vindication of the rule of law and of the economy’s future.
That framing is the whole argument in miniature. If economic measures can be introduced outside the framework when it is politically convenient, then the framework is not a constraint, and a framework that is not a constraint has no value to the international counterparty who was relying on it. The cost of the precedent is borne by every subsequent transaction that has to price in the possibility of a repeat.
The same logic inside a company
The corporate version of this argument is visible in the Currimjee group’s own recent history, and it is unusually clean because the counterfactual is so easy to imagine.
In July 2024 the group listed 25% of Emtel on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius. It did not need to. The business was profitable, the family could fund it, and the listing imposed continuous disclosure obligations, an external shareholder register with legal rights, quarterly scrutiny and a market price that would henceforth be published whether or not it was flattering.
Set against that: a listed subsidiary can raise capital from parties who will never meet the family; it can use paper for acquisitions; it has an observable valuation for succession purposes; and its management is subject to a discipline that no internal process reproduces. In the same period the group appointed a Managing Director from outside the family and implemented a strategic governance reorganisation.
Every one of those moves converts private discretion into public accountability. That is the definition of a governance cost. It is also, precisely, what makes the enterprise financeable, saleable and survivable beyond the people currently running it.
Three tests worth applying
Can a stranger price you?
If valuing your enterprise requires a relationship with the owner, you have not built an institution. You have built a reputation, and reputations do not transfer.
Does the framework bind when it is inconvenient?
A rule that is suspended under pressure was never a rule. This applies identically to a national legal framework and to a board’s conflict-of-interest policy.
Who can say no?
In any structure, identify the person who can block the most powerful individual and survive the attempt. If no such person exists — in the state, in the regulator, in the boardroom — the governance is decorative.
The uncomfortable conclusion
Institutional quality behaves like productive capital: it takes decades to accumulate, it produces returns that are hard to attribute, it depreciates without visible signals, and it can be consumed rapidly for short-term gain by people who will not be present when the bill arrives.
The Singapore comparison drawn publicly at the close of the Business Mauritius presidency named the specific attributes at issue — meritocracy, pragmatism, civic discipline, and a frontal approach to corruption with the resolve to investigate and sanction unequivocally — with the explicit argument that governance and economic development cannot be separated. That is not a cultural observation. It is a statement about which line of the national accounts institutional quality belongs on.
Sources referenced in this essay: Currimjee Group published corporate history (currimjee.com); Le Mauricien, 28 September 2023; Business Mauritius and L’Express, 1 October 2025; Business Magazine cover interview; Defi Media; World Bank; African Development Bank; International Monetary Fund; Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2024 Ibrahim Index of African Governance. This essay is editorial analysis prepared for anilcurrimjee.com and is not a statement by Anil C. Currimjee except where a sourced quotation appears.