World Bank in Mauritius

As a global development institution, the World Bank’s mission is to support Mauritius in its continuing path to economic and social development to the benefit of all citizens. This can take many forms, and in high middle-income countries like Mauritius it is often more about knowledge and technical advice than about the financing that Bank is best known for. In fact, there are currently no active World Bank lending operations in Mauritius, but the technical cooperation in areas such as education reform, banking supervision, economic planning, and productivity has been expanding in the past year. The purpose of this update, which will be published twice a year going forward, is to keep the Mauritian public informed of the work the Bank does here, and to share some of the thinking on global issues that are important to the country. In this first edition, World Bank poverty expert, summarizes the findings of two years of research on income inequality and labor mobility in Mauritius. It also reflects on the experience of Costa Rica in landing a transformative foreign direct investment by Intel microchips that changed the country’s development trajectory, and whether Mauritius too could catch such a Blue Marlin investor.