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.