The five most competitive African countries as a benchmark for other African nations

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2006 in the subject Economics - Case Scenarios, grade: 1,5, University of Cooperative Education Mannheim, course: International Seminar, language: English, abstract: This term paper on hand analyses the competitiveness of five African nations.

Depending on the data from the WEF, five African nations have been chosen.

These are in detail South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Mauritius and Egypt. The

main goal of this paper was to analyze these countries in their competitiveness

and benchmark them as an example for other African nations. Therefore this

paper first gives an overview on the current political situation, the geographical

conditions and the historic background to each country. Each country then is

analyzed in the primary, secondary and tertiary sector and gives details on the

main economical challenges of each country. The benchmarking deals with the

performance in different categories which are Government Efficiency, Business

Efficiency, Economic Performance and Infrastructure.

The paper on hand comes to the conclusion that the selected five countries are

indeed very competitive countries within the African continent. They all have dealt

with problematic fields of their economy in the past in their individual way and thus

improved their performance. The majority of these five countries still have to work

harder on these problematic areas to reach a worldwide competitive level, some of

them have already reached this level to some extent.

The necessary background information and statistics have been taken from the

World Economic Forum (WEF) and various reliable internet resources. The paper

on hand analyses the data within the past 16 years or more, depending on the

question analysed.