Firm Size, Technological Capabilities and Market-oriented Policies in Mauritius

Abstract

Mauritius is an outlier in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of its impressive growth in garment exports since it adopted outward-oriented policies in the early 1980s. Little, however, is known about the role of technological factors in the behaviour of Mauritian garment exporters. Using recent methodological developments in the literature on technological capabilities, this paper explores this issue. It constructs a "technology index" and conducts econometric analysis on factors affecting enterprise-level technological development and export performance in a sample of enterprises. Firm size, technical manpower, training expenditures and external technical assistance are positively related to the technology index, suggesting that investments in human capital and information (both facilitated by size) improve technological performance. The technology index and foreign ownership have positive and significant effects on export performance. The technology index is a robust tool of empirical research and can be used to analyse the technological record of enterprises in adjusting countries.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 151 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.