1 HOW POLITICAL CHOICES AND PRACTICES SHAPE THE ECONOMIC FATE OF AFRICA? THE COMPARATIVE CASE STUDIES OF MADAGASCAR AND MAURITIUS Dr Ketakandriana RAFITOSON Executive Director, Transparency International – Initiative Madagascar (TI-IM) Paper presented on July 11, 2019 at Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) during the 2019 Tsinghua Area Studies Forum Abstract: Is democracy a precondition or a pre-requisite to economic development? Many scholars have attempted to answer this question (Teorell, Robinson and Acemoglu, etc.), with various results, but there are still grey zones left without any clear explanation. The aim of this paper is to investigate and re-ask the question in two precise contexts of atypical African countries: Madagascar and Mauritius. They are atypical because they are African while being outside Africa, and even if they are both islands, their economic trajectories are different from one another. Why has Mauritius succeeded in terms of economic growth and parameters while Madagascar has continuously failed despite tremendous natural opportunities and factors (human and natural resources, land, climate, etc.)? What if the answer was political? Not only in terms of policy (political economy, economic policy) but also politics and political behavior. The chosen methodology consists in two distinct steps. First of all, briefly depicting the political and economic pathways of each country. Both of them have been colonized, Madagascar by France and Mauritius by the Great Britain, but their histories have evolved in different ways. Secondly, comparing the trajectories of the two countries by cross-analyzing six well-known international indexes and rankings in a 10 year-period (2008-2018): the V-Dem index, the Freedom House index, the Doing Business index, Transparency International’s Corruption perception Index (CPI), the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, and the Mo Ibrahim Index. These indexes can give interesting explanations to the political and economic fates of Madagascar and Mauritius. A hybrid analysis will be conducted all along this study, establishing the relationship between political and economic development in the two countries, with a specific focus on political ethics, political leadership, and political behavior. The results of this research, along with those elaborated by other authors such as Ralambomahay (2013), may help international stakeholders to better discover and understand this other side of Africa. ----