ABSTRACT
There has been a considerable amount of interest in academic and policy circles about why a small, remote island in the Indian ocean like Mauritius, relatively poorly endowed with natural resources, should have been so successful in the last decade in promoting its economic development and non-traditional exports (Romer 1993, Greenaway and Milner 1991). Indeed the island’s performance is even more remarkable given that when James Meade examined the island’s problems in the 1960s, he was very pessimistic about the prospects for development and for avoiding the ‘Malthusian solution’ (Meade 1961, 1967). In the mid-1960s per capita income in Mauritius was about US$175 and there were no manufactured exports. By 1990, however, per capita income had risen to US$2,225, and manufactured exports accounted for over 60 per cent of total exports.
