By Nirmal Jivan Shah
Seychelles talks confidently about building a Blue Economy. But how easy is it, in practice, to start, grow and sustain the businesses that are supposed to deliver it?
The World Bank’s new Business Ready (B-READY) assessment offers a useful reality check. It is not a Blue Economy report, but it examines precisely the enabling environment on which a Blue Economy depends: regulation, public services and the efficiency with which the two come together in practice.
B-READY follows businesses through ten critical areas, including entry, location, utilities, labour, finance, international trade, taxation, dispute resolution, competition and insolvency. It also brings environmental sustainability, digitalisation and gender into the assessment. For emerging sectors such as aquaculture, marine biotechnology, regenerative tourism, sustainable fisheries value addition and other ocean-based enterprises, these conditions matter enormously.
For Seychelles, the picture is mixed. Business Entry is relatively strong and Taxation is the country’s strongest comparative area. But the wider institutional environment is less reassuring. Seychelles sits in the bottom 20% of economies assessed for its Regulatory Framework and in the bottom 40% for Public Services. Operational Efficiency fares better, placing in the top 60%, while Business Insolvency falls back into the bottom 20%.
This matters because Blue Economy businesses are often particularly dependent on government systems. They may require environmental and sectoral approvals, access to land or sea space, utilities, imported equipment, skilled labour, finance and functioning regulatory agencies, sometimes all at once.
What the report shows is that Seychelles is capable of making parts of the business system work, but too much still depends on navigating weak institutions, fragmented processes and administrative machinery that has not kept pace with the needs of a modern economy.
B-READY repeatedly identifies weaknesses in digitalisation, interoperability between government systems, transparency, dispute resolution and insolvency procedures. These mean delay, uncertainty, higher transaction costs and management time diverted from actually building a business.
A major issue that B-READY does not really capture is scale. Seychelles is a very small market, with a limited population, narrow labour pool, high dependence on imports and relatively few firms in many sectors. Those structural realities raise unit costs, restrict competition, make specialised skills harder to find and can leave businesses with little room to absorb regulatory delays or additional charges.
Seychelles has spent years defining what the Blue Economy could become. The harder question may now be whether our business environment is ready for it.
Source: World Bank B-READY 2025 – Seychelles Economy Profile