Quatre Bornes, 21 March 2019: A Productivity Survey Workshop with the Technical Assistance of the World Bank kicked off on Thursday morning at the Gold Crest Hotel. The workshop is part of an overall project that proposes to launch a regular, dedicated firm level survey on productivity and its enabling factors, along with a flagship report that exploits the newly collected data to present policy-oriented research on key questions related to the productivity challenge in Mauritius.
It is further expected that the availability of firm level productivity data would spark additional research by academia and thus further contribute to the knowledge base on productivity in Mauritius.
World Bank senior economist, David Francis, based in Washington, flew to Mauritius to lead this one-day workshop which gathered various stakeholders from the both the private and public sectors.
NPCC has consulted key stakeholders with regard to their views on the existing evidence base on productivity and priority knowledge gaps on productivity for evidence-based policy making. The workshop is a concluding session for all stakeholders to take stock of the information collected and build consensus on next steps with regard to data collection and research.
According to Hon Dharmendar Sesungkur, Minister of Financial Services and Good Governance, who opened the workshop, a keen sense and proper understanding of productivity must become part of the ethos of our people as it is and has been with winning economies such as Germany, Japan and Singapore. “We need to inculcate a culture of performance and productivity in the population and it all starts with awareness and education from an early age. The working population needs to truly realise that productivity ultimately benefits institutions, its employees and their families,” he pointed out in his keynote address.
“Improving productivity is not an easy task. This requires a holistic transformation, requiring productivity improvements to be charted differently, not only in terms of technology, regulations, industry structure, talent and skills, and productivity drive, but more importantly in terms of understanding our current status of productivity,” the Executive Director of the NPCC, Mr. Deepak Balgobin said.
For the chairman of the NPCC, Mr. Sanjiv Mulloo, the time is ripe for a national debate on productivity. He took examples of highly productive companies that employ lesser people than those that are lesser productive but employ higher number of people. “Productivity is all about a new mindset and it concerns each and everyone among us. However, a proper measure of productivity on the Mauritian economic landscape has become very important in the present context as we are preparing ourselves to adopt a high- income nation status in the coming years,” he said, adding there are indications that we have other emerging industries where we had rather put our efforts to reskill the labour force of sunset industries.
The World Bank Country Representative, Mr. Erik von Uexkull, however reminded that the project is not at all an academic exercise. “On the contrary, what we are trying to look for are very concrete and actionable results on what can be done to help firms to further increase their productivity,” he stated.
Based on the outcomes of the workshop, an appropriate firm survey will be designed and carried out in the coming weeks.