Sector Reviews

Despite being the main contributor to the national GDP and a growth rate of 4.4%, the financial services sector in Mauritius lacks transformative measures in the current budget.  The budget focuses on reinforcing Mauritius's status as an International Financial Centre (IFC) by aligning with past strategies. This includes reviewing the financial Services sector blueprint iteratively and developing a blueprint to establish Mauritius as a regional Fintech Hub.

The sector aims to address talent and investor attraction challenges by introducing long-term permits for high-skilled professionals, forming Strategic Partnership Agreements with India and African nations, and improving market liquidity via a new framework for secondary trading of Government bonds on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius. 

Additionally, measures to streamline business processes to enhance the ease of doing business in the financial services sector are most welcomed. These involve faster processing of investor queries and licences and expanding e-KYC to the global business sector.

The Minister of Finance has partly tried to overcome the shortage of workers by extending the work permit period of foreign workers to 8 years but has not gone far enough to fix this issue. The Agricultural Workers Regulations will be amended to provide more flexibility for recruitment in the agricultural sector but there is a crucial lack of detail around that measure. 

The increase in the grant under the Cane Replantation Scheme is welcome - 9,900 arpents have been replanted over the last 3 years. Overall however, the budget has failed to provide sufficient incentives to individuals and existing planters, breeders and farmers to invest in earnest in the agri sector. 

Alarmingly, in the Real Estate sector, it appears (we have not been provided with the details) that we have added more red tape with the addition of a Strategic Environmental Assessment for morcellements or Property Development Scheme (PDS) projects above 10 arpents and any smart city. The token gesture to include a tiny forest (4% of total project land) in future morcellements, smart city and PDS projects should however be lauded.

We would welcome greater transparency and accountability in the running of the newly-created National Resilience Fund (Contribution of Rs100,000 from a smart city company per plot or per property). 

The support of the government for the minimum wage increase, the freight rebate scheme and the DBM wage support are temporary measures that are not addressing the longer term structural issues of this sector.

The removal of quotas on labour will come as relief to operators who have been struggling with recruiting and retaining our local workforce.

The increase in Participation in International Fairs SME Refund Scheme to Rs500,000 per year will hopefully encourage entrepreneurs to open new sale channels and boost local products and services.

When will manufacturing move up the value chain? When will the country create a vision of Mauritius manufacturing 2.0?

The measures announced will not be enough to meet the expectations or fuel the growth of the ICT sector, or to build capacity to meet future growth demands and attract further foreign direct investments.

With the shortage of talents and the increased global competitiveness, more could have been done to boost this sector. We would have liked to see measures prompting investment in research and development, or a review of our education system to promote Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). 

On a global scale, digital government is now viewed as the path towards enabling national agendas, achieving economic diversification and developing a more sustainable future. Digitalisation of new services to the citizens has been absent in this budget, when more could have been done to address the quality of our public services, for example the NLTA which is struggling on a daily basis to provide basic services to the citizens.

Another area that remains untackled is the issue of digital trust which fosters confidence in the credibility and security of digital services. We would have expected measures relating to cybersecurity strategies and capabilities.

The announcement of the development of a 5-year blueprint is encouraging and we hope that it will see its way through as the country urgently needs to define its strategic direction, enabled by innovative technologies such as Gen-AI & Cloud platforms.