Executive Summary and foreign shareholders equally. All shareholders should have the same voting rights. The authorities should also consider studying the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to improve public company governance in the country. 1.77 22 The Code of Corporate Governance and the Companies Act of 2001 list the roles and responsibilities of boards of directors of companies in the country. However, many companies are family-owned and senior managers are often board members. The CRM also learnt that the directors of most of the government parastatals were political appointees, rather than professionals appointed for their competence. This therefore raises doubts about their competence and objectivity. The same directors may sit on numerous boards of listed companies. This concentration of board membership in a few hands affects their independence and decision making. The Mauritian authorities should consider making the Code of Corporate Governance compulsory rather than voluntary. The Financial Services Commission (FSC) told the CRM that the government is considering doing so. The authorities should also consider providing the newly established Mauritius Institute of Directors (MIoD) with adequate resources to enable it to offer training on corporate governance to new and current members of public and private sector boards. They should also consider limiting the number of boards on which one person can sit. 1.78 In summary, despite the challenges that Mauritius faces in entrenching good corporate governance in the country, its efforts so far are laudable, even though corporate governance is a fairly new concept in the country. Corporate governance is important to the authorities’ plans to attract FDI in order to grow the national economy. It is therefore one of the driving forces behind the government’s efforts to do so. The revisions to the laws that support this effort and the business climate are also laudable. The authorities should therefore seriously consider enforcing the new and updated laws and codes. 6. SOCIOECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 1.79 Mauritius has achieved sustained growth since independence. This has enabled the country to achieve the status of an upper middleincome country, develop a resolute social policy to eradicate extreme poverty, and build a welfare state. It protects vulnerable social groups, and the people have free access to health and education at all levels (from preprimary to higher education). There is a basic pension benefit for the elderly, disabled persons, widows and orphans. There are also Executive Summary income support programmes, free public transport and subsidised consumer products. 1.80 Apart from universal and free access to public services and universal social protection, there is a contributory social protection scheme. It has covered retirement, occupational accidents and unemployment since February 2009. 1.81 Mauritius made these achievements possible through its firm collective will to transcend the difficulties inherent in an island that is far from the hubs of global production and consumption, limited in its land area and population, and endowed with few natural resources. 1.82 The country has gradually acquired human and institutional capacity. This has enabled it to develop a vision for planning its economic and social development, ensure the diversification of its economic base, promote its autonomy, and establish a resilient economy. 1.83 Mauritius is determined to develop by mobilising its own resources. It therefore searched for, and found, international support to deal with the exogenous shocks caused by the termination of the multifibre accords and the abandonment of the commercial preferences for sugar. It embarked on the greatest investment programme in its history. 1.84 Relatively high public debt characterises Mauritius’s domestic finances and short-term commitments dominate them. The government developed a strategy to manage these internal finances. The government based its strategy on reducing their total volume rapidly and restructuring them in order to reduce short-term risks. The country’s debt-servicing commitment to external finances seems moderate, and foreign exchange reserves offer reasonable security. The recently introduced budget management relies on rules that limit current expenditure, and on implementing programmes and achieving specific ob-jectives in a triennial framework that the MOFEE coordinates. 1.85 Mauritius’s progress in managing its budget rigorously must, however, be seen in terms of its longer-term vision. It should use this vision as the basis for all sectoral economic, social and other plans. They should all have the same time frames. Similarly, it should see infrastructure development within a medium- to long-term planning framework for land use and integrate it with the long-term vision and the broader sectoral economic and social plans. 23