Ben Muse

How Mauritius mastered malaria

Malaria is a killer.  According to Jeffrey Sachs and Pia Malaney (see below)  "there are 300 to 500 million clinical cases every year, and between one and three million deaths, mostly of children, are attributable to this disease. Every 40 seconds a child dies of malaria, resulting in a daily loss of more than 2,000 young lives worldwide."

Malaria also slows economic growth in developing countries.  Gallup and Sachs look at The Economic Burden of Malaria (The American Journal of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene,  January/February 2001).  Sachs and Malaney examine: The Economic and Social Burden of Malaria (Nature, February 2002).  Jeffrey Sachs has a web page on his work on malaria at the Earth Institute: Prof. Jeffrey D. Sachs on Malaria .  The page provides access to published and unpublished papers, datasets, and general background.

According to Sachs and Malaney, bottom-up estimates of the costs of malaria cases, obtained by summing estimates of the costs of medical care and lost income for individual cases, are generally much smaller than the top-down estimates from looking at patterns in aggregate national data.  They argue that the gap is created by behavioral responses to life in a malarious environment that are counter-productive for growth.  These behavioral responses create costs beyond the care costs and income losses for individual cases.  While the empirical evidence on how these behavioral responses work themselves out sounds relatively limited, they speculate that the following processes may be relevant:

New World Bank Report on Mauritius

"Marshall Jevons," over at the The Bayesian Heresy, reports that the World Bank has just released a country economic memorandum (CEM) on Mauritius: A New CEM on Mauritius (Feb 19, 2007).  You can access it through his post.

This report was apparently finalized in May 2006, but its preface notes that it may already be somewhat out of date.

Of course, nothing is the last word for long. The FY 2006/2007 budget announced bold and sweeping reforms. In light of these, parts o f the CEM may already be out of date.  Indeed, the budget measures curbing tax expenditures, reforming the pension system, simplifying business registration procedures and dismantling the EPZ went far beyond anything envisaged by the CEM. However, many o f the CEM’s ideas are still pertinent and in some areas such as education and science and technology policy, the agenda has not yet begun to be addressed.

Fazeer Sheik Rahim gave this budget the "thumbs up" last June: The Budget for 2006-07  (An Economist in Paradise, June 12).

Never have economic ideas found such resonance in a Mauritian Budget as in the one presented on June 9 by Finance Minister, Mr Sithanen, for fiscal year 2006-2007. Good Economics offers the right incentives, recognises the importance and limits of the State, realises the constraints, threats and possibilities of modern times. Bad Economics yields the wrong incentives, delves into ideological debates, attempts to perpetuate the rents and privileges associated with bygone eras. Good Economics has finally arrived....

Rahim's post goes into the budget in some detail.

Note: post revised Feb 21.  Originally said "out of date" rather than "somewhat out of date."  I didn't mean to imply that this wasn't a useful report.

Blogging from Paradise

Fazeer Sheik Rahim, a macroeconomics lecturer at the University of Mauritius, started blogging in February: An Economist in Paradise. Mauritius, A Rediscovery .  He's a Mauritian who has recently returned home from many years overseas, which is why his blog is billed as a "rediscovery."

Rahim has been posting every few days.  The posts are carefully prepared essays on economic topics, often suggested by daily life - the economics of playground markets for sports stickers, sorting phenomona and segregation in Port Louis.  While they're interesting for economists, they've been written to appeal to a broader audience as well.  The audience should also extend beyond people with an interest in Mauritius; despite being billed as a "rediscovery" this is more about economics than Mauritius.

It's the weekend, take some time off!

Go out to dinner... in Kinshasa: Gombe, Kinshasa / The Taj 

... or take in a pet show in Mauritius: SPCA Pet Show, November 6 .

The last post is from Isabelle Kai Wing, a young Mauritian, who posts intermittently on life in her country: Mauritius. 

Wing has been posting once or twice a month since last spring.  In general she posts on recreational activities, visits to parks, the car show, a night out with her husband, the dog show, a family wedding.  There are some posts on political events. 

Lots of pictures, but she apparently posts them separately from the related text posts.  You have to go the relevant month in the archives to see text and pictures together.

This post ( Doulos, 3rd - 13th November ) describes how local booksellers protested the visit of the Doulos, the vehicle for the German based charitable foundation, Good Books for All.  The foundation's mission:

WiFi in Mauritius

Laurie Goering reports that Mauritius is likely to become the first country completely covered by WiFi: 'Mauritius Set to Become First 'Cyber-island'  (Digital Communities, Jan 26, 2006):

You've just become Finance Minister of Mauritius. What now?

It's 1982. 

Your party, after years in opposition, has won the election and taken office as a part of a coalition.  You...have been made Minister of Finance.

But things are not good.  Growth in the economy's three key sectors (sugar, the export processing zone, and tourism) has stalled, unemployment is high, real wages have been dropping, the budget deficit is very high, and Mauritius is involved in a structural adjustment program with the IMF and World Bank.

What are you going to do?

Let Philip English set the stage and put you on it, in the World Bank publication: Mauritius. Reigniting the Engines of Growth. A Teaching Case Study.

Here's the teachers note: Mauritius.  Reigniting the Engines of Growth.  A Teaching Case Study.  Teaching Notes.

What you can't know in 1982 is that great days are ahead.

More on Mauritian Growth

Mauritius has had one of the fastest growing economies in Africa.

Brian Chernoff and Andrew Warner (C&W) start by explaining how unlikely this fast growth was, in this draft article on Mauritian growth (in preparation for a conference on growth in another small island economy - Iceland)  Sources of Fast Growth in Mauritius: 1960 – 2000 (1st draft, Center for International Development at Harvard University, May 2002):

Mauritius is a small remote tropical island in a forgotten section of the Indian Ocean. From the perspective of current research on the sources of fast economic growth, Mauritius’ endowments would not have seemed particularly favorable for growth back in the 1960’s or early 1970’s. It is geographically remote. Its climate is tropical, with attendant disease burdens and problems with tropical agriculture. The size of the domestic market is tiny, with little scope for exploiting domestic economies of scale. It had rapid population growth in the 1960’s and seemed to be at risk of a Malthusian trap.  And its main export product at the time, sugar, was subject to all the risks of the international sugar market, not only international price risk but also the risk from devastating cyclones. Its export sector in the 1960’s was anything but diversified, with sugar dominating exports. It was thus a natural resource intensive economy subject to the curse of natural resources. Mauritius also had a history of colonial domination by several powers and as a result its population was a mixture of several ethnic groups, with all the social and political risks of ethnic strife.

Mauritian growth has been impressive since 1970.  C&W calculate that annual GDP growth averaged about 1% in the 1960s, about 5% from 1970-1982, and about 6% thereafter.  It was relatively variable up to the mid-eighties, relatively stable after:

 

(Adapted from Chernow and Walters)

What made Mauritius grow?

It's pretty dark in Alaska right now.  Of course the shortest day came shortly before Christmas. 

In Juneau, the light that day lasted about 6 1/2 hours.  But Juneau's daylight might not be considered real daylight elsewhere. Clouds screened out a lot of the light we might have had.  Moreover, the sun lies low on the horizon, even when it's up, and much of the time we're in the shade of the mountains that crowd close around us.

It's worse further north - in Barrow (on the shore of the Arctic Ocean) they won't see the sun for weeks.  The New York Times just ran a story on Alaska's dark days, highlighting "seasonal affective disorder" - the dark induced depression that many feel at this time: In Alaska, Darkness and Depression Descend (Associated Press, December 18):

Winter is a drag to some extent for one out of five Americans, studies suggest. A smaller fraction - mostly women and young adults - suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, a type of depression stemming from decreased daylight.

Nearly 10 percent of Alaskans suffer from the disorder to some degree, according to a 1992 study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Symptoms include lethargy, a heightened desire for sleep, cravings for carbohydrates, feelings of melancholy, fuzzy thinking and loss of libido or sociability, said Suzanne Womack Strisik, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Severe cases can be debilitating, even prompting thoughts of suicide. Experts say, however, suicide rates actually peak with increasing spring light.

"You don't have enough energy to make a plan before then," Ms. Strisik said. "It's too much trouble. Once the light starts coming back, there's more energy, but reasoning is still off. "

So, naturally one's thoughts turn to warmer, sunnier, more cheerful places.  Like tropical Mauritius:

Mauritius, an island nation, is located in the Indian Ocean.  This Air Mauritius route map shows where:

There have been a number of impressive growth episodes in Africa: Growing in Africa ...