Ester Boserup - Case Study: Mauritius

Case Study: Mauritius

Mauritius is an island country of 1860 km2 in area, located off the east coast of Africa. Farming and fishing are its main ventures, with agriculture accounting for 4.6% of its GDP. This is comprehensible since it has fertile soils and a tropical climate. Its exports are divided into four main categories: sugar (32%), garments (31%), plastics (32%) and others (5%).

Its population in 1992 was 1,094,000 people. For 2025, the estimated population is 1,365,000. This would mean a growth rate of 1.45%, with a doubling time of 47 years. Its fertility rate was of 2.17 children per woman.

It is possible to notice how uneven population growth has been in Mauritius. At first it was a maintained at a more or less constant level, because there were almost equal values of birth and death rates. Around the 1950s, the birth rate increased significantly (from 35 per thousand to more than 45 per thousand). The death rate declined from 30 to 15 per thousand shortly afterwards.

The rate of natural increase was very great, and there was a great pressure on the country for resources because of this increasing population. It was then that the government had to intervene. It promoted family planning, restricted early marriage, provided improved health care and looked to improve the status of women. The government also worked on diversifying agriculture, invested in industry and improved trading links.

With time, there were changes in general attitude toward family size and people were getting married later. As well, there was an improvement in educational and work opportunities for women (in 1975 employment of women was 22.3%, by 1990 it had increased to 35.75%). Many transnational companies came to Mauritius because of tax incentives, the Freeport at Port Luis, the large number of educated residents, a considerable amount of cheap labour and the good transportation means present.
This would assert to us Boserup’s theory that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Because the population had risen, the government had to take measures to adapt to this growth. It had to improve and diversify agriculture, so proving agricultural intensification and that “population growth causes agricultural growth.” (This idea is presented in The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure; 1965.) It also suggests that a country must improve its technology to be able to support the growing population, and that many technologies will not be taken advantage of if the population is not large enough. (These ideas are presented in Population and Technological Change: A Study of Long-term Trends; 1981.) Mauritius had to build a Freeport and improve transportation to be able to maintain its population.