According to the quarterly survey on business climate, released Thursday by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Mauritius (MCCI), 16 % of companies in the country say they will resort to layoffs in the short to medium term. However, they add that this will happen if the situation continues to deteriorate.
They were 5% expected to dismiss at the end of the second quarter of 2011. In addition, 82% of respondents do not count jobs created in the next three months. Only 2% of respondents believed they would in the workforce during the last quarter of the year, against 26% at the end of June 2011.
According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO), unemployment reached 8% in the second quarter of 2011, against 7.6% during the same period in 2010 and 8.3% in the first quarter of 2011. This is the manufacturing sector which provides the largest degreasing, with 25% of companies anticipate to thank some of their staff. They feel experience a drop in orders. Any industrial company has no plans to create jobs. The same is true of companies in the commercial sector.
However, 17.2% of businesses expect layoffs. In the service sector, which has always been the engine of the business climate, 92% of companies do not create jobs and 8% plan to hire.
However, for the first time since the onset of the study of the MCCI on the business climate in May 2010, some companies, representing less than 1% will make redundancies. These intentions are explained in lay study of the MCCI in the international economy pushed down by the debt crisis in the U.S. and Europe, which are our main markets, the rate of the Mauritian rupee against the dollar and the euro, a decline in consumer confidence and unfair competition. Finally, operators criticize the country's monetary policy by saying "they do not include restrictive monetary measures in recent months over the continued rise in the rate [...] at a time when monetary easing would be appropriate. "
According to surveyed no company did not consider the favorable economic situation and 65.6% consider it very unfavorable. However, Cheeroo Mahmood, secretary general of the MCCI, considering a possible rise in unemployment trying to reassure: "The outlook is negative. So there will no doubt impact on unemployment, but it is still too early to tell. Do not just layoffs to raise unemployment, but we need job creation to bring it down. "