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From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

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3 POVERTY AND WEALTH GOING FOR GROWTHcontracts, avoiding the two-week ‘cookie-cutter’ variety thatprevailed elsewhere. Many of them ended up taking citizenshipand staying.Leadership. The first two presidents, Seretse Khama and QuettMasire, built a sense of nationhood and an effective statebureaucracy.Despite economic growth, however, the country still faces theproblems of all resource-based economies that fail <strong>to</strong> diversify:unemployment, inequality, and persistent poverty. Twenty per cen<strong>to</strong>f the population live on less than $1 a day. The government isbanking on diversifying within natural resources (for example,sorting and polishing diamonds at home, rather than in London)and developing services such as <strong>to</strong>urism and finance, whichshould create more jobs. But with a single party in power for the40 years since independence, some degree of erosion (publicdissatisfaction, allegations of corruption) seems inevitable.The success of Mauritius meanwhile has claimed some impressiveacademic scalps. In 1961 Nobel Prize-winning economist JamesMeade saw the economy of the Indian Ocean island as doomed<strong>to</strong> failure – dependent on a single crop, with a rapidly growingpopulation susceptible <strong>to</strong> ethnic tensions. ‘The outlook forpeaceful development is poor,’ he concluded.Yet since independence in 1968, Mauritius has become a highlycompetitive, inclusive democracy generating growth rates morecommon <strong>to</strong> East Asia than <strong>to</strong> Africa (5.9 per cent a year from1973–99, compared with the African average of 2.4 per cent).Once reliant on sugarcane, it moved in<strong>to</strong> textiles and garments ina classic process of labour-intensive industrialisation, largely ledby local inves<strong>to</strong>rs, and then diversified further in<strong>to</strong> <strong>to</strong>urism andfinancial services.Improvements in human development have been equallyimpressive. Not only have all the usual indica<strong>to</strong>rs improved –life expectancy, school enrolments, literacy, infant mortality –income inequality has actually fallen substantially since growth<strong>to</strong>ok off. Finally, all this has been achieved with rich-countrylevels of social protection: active trade unions, price controls onsocially sensitive items, and generous social security, particularlyfor elderly people and for civil servants.CASE STUDY193

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