Technical Assistance Reports

This report discusses the findings and recommendations of a diagnostic assessment of the quality of public sector debt statistics (PSDS) of Mauritius based on the IMF’s Data Quality Assessment Framework (DQAF) for PSDS. The assessment was undertaken in September 2025 as part of an initiative—funded by the Government of Japan—to strengthen the quality of public sector debt data in select African countries. Mauritius’ public debt is estimated to be 86 percent of GDP at the end of the 2024/25 fiscal year (end of June 2025), having risen significantly over the last five years. According to the PSDS reports of the Ministry of Finance (MOF), the consolidated gross public debt was 64 percent of GDP at the end of December 2019, just before the Covid pandemic. The high public debt levels of recent years have translated into a high risk of sovereign stress according to IMF’s latest debt sustainability analysis of June 2025. Mauritius subscribes to the IMF’s Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS) and submits quarterly debt data to the Joint IMF-World Bank Quarterly Public Sector Debt statistics database (QPSD). The quarterly debt data are disseminated in a regular and timely fashion through both the National Summary Data Page (NSDP) of the SDDS, and via the QPSD. In addition, the MOF publish a range of detailed quarterly public sector debt tables on their website. However, the mission found that debt reports could be more comprehensive through the inclusion of all debt instruments and more could be done to meet user needs by clearly presenting revisions, publishing stock-flow reconciliations, improving metadata and ensuring consistency with other macroeconomic statistics. In addition, the legislative and administrative arrangements could be further strengthened, including through the designation of PSDS as official statistics subject to the oversight and safeguards of the Statistics Act. The authorities have accepted the mission recommendations and developed an action plan to implement them in a phased manner.