DEVPOLICY BLOG 29 April 2021 – Both Mauritius and Fiji are remotely located islands situated far from global business centres, both developed as sugar plantation economies, but their economies have taken drastically different paths over the last half a century. Last year the World Bank reclassified Mauritius as a high-income country. Its 2019 income (GNI per capita) for the first time exceeded the US$12,535 threshold for that category. Fiji meanwhile continues to be classified as an upper-middle-income economy, with its 2019 GNI per capita of US$5,800 at just 46% of the high-income threshold. While Mauritius may lose the high-income tag temporarily as a result of COVID-19, we thought its achievement would be a good time to revisit the topic of Fiji-Mauritius comparisons: Biman Prasad wrote a paper in 2012 explaining why Fiji is not the Mauritius of the Pacific, and Satish Chand blogged on the subject in 2010.
Fiji (current population of 0.9 million) and Mauritius (current population of 1.3 million) became independent in 1970 and 1968, respectively. As Figure 1 shows, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fiji was actually richer than Mauritius. Now Mauritius has more than twice the income of Fiji.
Mauritius has grown faster than Fiji every decade from the 1980s (which was disastrous for Fiji) to the 2000s, as revealed in Figure 2. Fiji did better in the 2010s, but its growth was slowing even before COVID-19. Even at the rates of the last decade, it will take at least four decades for Fiji to catch up to Mauritius.
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