Titbits :CT Power and MID: The Vision ?; A Cacophony of Figures ;The National Strategic Transformation Commission (NSTC) revisited; Zone d’Education Prioritaire (ZEP): A different approach.

CT Power and MID: The Vision ?

After the all-out “bétonnage” of the island, the commercial centres, the IRS and the obsession with road construction without any concomitant reduction in road congestion, we can look now forward to be asphyxiated by higher levels of emissions from more coal-fired power plants which are likely to be greater than that from all cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined. When thick dust and black soot start coating the fresh green of our majestic flamboyants, mangroves and sugarcane fields, they will be sounding the death knell of our idyllic island. It will no longer be “un plaisir”.

Titbits: Depreciation of the Rupee; Wrong timing - The trip to Maldives; Quality institutions make a difference; Tablets for Form IV -a Challenge; Disciplining the medium.

Depreciation of the Rupee.

The IMF report ‘Mauritius External Balances from a Long-Term Perspective – May 2012’ notes that “… using cross-country panel methodologies as well as single country time series techniques, we estimate that the Mauritian Rupee is mildly overvalued with respect to fundamentals. Nevertheless, there is significant uncertainty about the size of the overvaluation.” And recent data on real exchange rate show that between 2007 and 2011, the real effective exchange rate (REER) appreciated by 18%; in 2010 and 2011, it appreciated by 3.2% and 6.2% respectively.