‘Covid Was Blessing In Disguise, Exposed Sri Lanka’s Macro Economy Errors’

NEW DELHI: The economic crisis Sri Lanka finds itself in was in the making for over a decade or so. Although the LTTE war ended in 2009, the country’s internal and external finances never improved due to the lack of required policy reforms, says Dr. Sirimal Abeyratne, Professor of Economics at the University of Colombo. Speaking to StratNews Global Editor-in-Chief Nitin A. Gokhale, Abeyratne rued that the country kept on borrowing to service earlier debts. And two pillars of the Sri Lankan economy—tourism and remittances—took a blow during the pandemic, exposing how successive governments had failed to see the writing on the wall. Chandrasena Maliyadde, vice president of Sri Lanka Economic Association, who joined in the discussion, was of the opinion that the country never hand a long-term economic development plan and when it switched to an open-market economy in 1978, nobody—the government, public and private sectors—was ready for the changes nor was able to adjust to them. Tune in for more.