Published MTimes 01 11 2018
The private sector is pressing Government to adopt a policy of opening our borders to attract young foreign talents and emulate Singapore, Dubai and Canada. We are being told by the MCCI that “these talents should not be feared because they will help the country to start the second stage of its development.”
Without having to compare ourselves to Singapore or Dubai which are filled with MNCs (multinational corporations) that send their own people there to set up shop, we are aware that the fastest way to be competitive on a global scale is to hire foreign talent, and learn from their knowledge and experience. But we do not have to emulate Singapore because the policy choice of relying heavily on foreign talent enables the Singapore government to hold down investment in education without having any significant detrimental effect on the economy.
According to Arturo Bris, the director of the IMD World Competitiveness Centre, Singapore relies a lot more on foreign talent because it spends relatively little money on education to develop and nurture its own people compared to other developed or developing countries. For instance, Singapore spends 2.9 percent of its GDP on education while Denmark, which is much less reliant on foreign talent, spends about 6-7 percent. The OECD average is 5.2 percent. The Mauritian government spends around 3.6% of GDP on education.
We should opt for the perfect combination of an education system that prepares people to meet the economy's needs: technical education and innovative skills and produce generally educated people with the capability/adaptability to learn new technologies. But for the higher and specialised skills, we can open up our borders to foreign talent and to our dispersed Mauritian diaspora. At the same time, we should encourage more of our local conglomerates to offer the right package to attract the best local talents and the Mauritian diaspora. For quite some time our corporate landscape has been characterized by a concentrated ownership structure dominated by a handful of families exercising control through pyramids and complex crossholdings. This has not encouraged the hiring of local talents and we do not see many locals in senior positions in the corporate sector. If the only reason for this was their quality, why is it that these same locals perform well when employed by established and reputed firms abroad?
Moreover, one of the important issues in hiring foreign talents is skills transfer to home-grown talent and how to exploit them without increasing costs. Thus instead of blanket approval for the hiring of foreign talents, we have to be more selective in our approach without unduly constraining some emerging and innovative sectors that will be needing foreign talents to fill in the gap.
