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. Themain goal of this paper was to analyze these countries in their competitivenessand benchmark them as an example for other African nations. Therefore thispaper first gives an overview on the current political situation, the geographicalconditions and the historic background to each country. Each country then isanalyzed in the primary, secondary and tertiary sector and gives details on themain economical challenges of each country. The benchmarking deals with theperformance in different categories which are Government Efficiency, BusinessEfficiency, Economic Performance and Infrastructure. The paper on hand comes to the conclusion that the selected five countries areindeed very competitive countries within the African continent. They all have dealtwith problematic fields of their economy in the past in their individual way and thusimproved their performance. The majority of these five countries still have to workharder on these problematic areas to reach a worldwide competitive level, some ofthem have already reached this level to some extent. The necessary background information and statistics have been taken from theWorld Economic Forum (WEF) and various reliable internet resources. The paperon hand analyses the data within the past 16 years or more, depending on thequestion analysed.