Bank of Mauritius

ABSTRACTThe transition to a model-based forecasting environment is encountered by hurdles in a small open developing economy. An attempt is made to validate the benefits of model-based inflation forecasting for central banks in small open developing economies. Despite data limitations, two distinct VARs are designed to project near-term inflation. Batteries of tests (such as sequential forecasts, out-of-sample forecasting errors, equal-weight forecasting errors and decomposition) are performed on the two models to assess their predictive ability. The main finding is that model-based forecasts are reliable for use by central banks in small open developing economies, as substantiated by the relatively low forecasting errors.

As a Muslim minority country located far off the east coast of South Africa, Mauritius has successfully introduced Islamic finance since 1998. However, the development is not as expected since two Islamic banking windows were closed down and the only Islamic commercial bank in the country has been struggling hard in order to generate favorable expected profits. The aims of this study are to investigate the bank selection criteria among Muslims in Mauritius and to evaluate the customer satisfaction upon the Islamic banking service quality in the country. The findings show that privacy, easy access, service quality, facilities, transparency and bank reputation are the factors influence Muslim Mauritian to patronize bank and interestingly religion and religiosity are out of it. The importance – performance analysis is used to provide an interesting visual analysis on the service quality items examined. The findings suggest that Islamic banks must improve their Tangible and Reliability aspects in order to satisfy the customers and eventually become more profitable.

ABSTRACTDespite data limitations, an attempt is made to find out if a GDP nowcasting model can provide reliable forecasts for a small open economy. Two competing Bayesian vector autoregressive models are tested rigorously to obtain the optimal model by minimizing in-sample forecasting errors. The main finding of this study is that GDP nowcasting can produce reliable results for a small open economy despite the unavailability of sufficient data sets and the lack of high frequency indicators.