For euro area countries the review should allow to assess whether these markets are fully compatible with participation in EMU. Here, product and labour markets must provide for enhanced adjustment capacity to adapt to a changing global economic environment and ensure sustained high levels of employment.
Despite these differences our two countries have much in common, as the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, recalled 60 years ago at that historic Independence day assembly in 1947: “We think of our brothers and sisters who have been cut off from us by political boundaries…they are with us and will remain of us whatever may happen and we shall be sharers in their… fortune.” Mauritius is a part of the great Indian Diaspora, with enduring links to the motherland, from which more than half our population are derived, and who continue to cherish many of the cultural and religious traditions, and I am told, even cricket here, is now seeing some reviving interest.