W. A. WijewardenaShocking the economy with cold-turkey policies
The founder Governor of the Central Bank, John Exter, had wonderful advice for anyone wishing to make a bet with a central bank regarding the success of a central bank’s policy when such policy goes opposite to the market’s collective wisdom: You bet on the side of the market and not on the side of the central bank and you will always win.
Rise of cultural nationalism: Boon or bane?
Non-toleration in a society of diversity
The veteran artiste and free thinker Asoka Handagama in delivering the Independence Day Commemoration Oration at the Central Bank on 4 February, as reported by the Sinhala Weekly Ravaya, had left his audience with a message: As long as people of a nation fail to recognise, tolerate and appreciate varying behavioural patterns of different groups of people in a society, it leads to conflict, violence and bloodshed which any progress-loving individual would have no hesitation in abhorring and condemning.
The rise of State capitalism: new masters of the universe or an ominous portent?
The Visible Hand of the government
‘The Visible Hand’ was the title which the famed London-based economics weekly, The Economist, used when it published a special report in its issue on 21 January 2012 on the rise of state capitalism in the modern era.
The title has a pun: The governments do not care to hide what they do when they interfere in an economy, because they think that they are all powerful and can do anything openly.
The rise of economic nationalism
Politically sweet music but ominous for long-term global prosperity
Identifying outsourcing as the villain
President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union Address delivered last Tuesday, made a hard-hitting attack on American companies that have shipped American jobs abroad by going pell-mell for outsourcing manufacturing jobs from countries like India and China in the last two decades.
Will Sri Lanka be snared in a lower middle income trap before it reaches the middle income trap proper?
Sri Lanka has been harping on maintaining a continuous high economic growth, unabated and undiminished, over the next decade to elevate itself from its present status as a lower middle income country to that of a higher middle income country, just one notch below the cherished goal of becoming a rich nation. But a recent World Bank report on the Global Economic Prospects has warned of a potential downside risk for all developing countries to maintain high economic growth rates in the coming years due to the slowdown of the economies in Europe, North America and Japan.
Poverty numbers: More should be learned before jumping into quick interpretations
Amazing poverty numbers
Sri Lanka’s official data agency, the Department of Census and Statistics or popularly known as DCS, has made the announcement that the country’s poverty level has declined drastically between 1995 and 2010.
According to the DCS, the number of people in poverty as a percentage of Sri Lanka’s total population has declined by leaps and bounds from 28.8% in 1995-96 to 22.7% in 2002 to 15.2% in 2006-07 and further to a record level of 8.9% in 2009-10 (available at http://www.statistics.gov.lk/poverty/PovertyIndicators2009_10.pdf ).
Economic growth: Will ‘feel good factor’ overwhelm all other prerequisites?
Dr. H.N Thenuwara, formerly Assistant Governor of the Central Bank and now an Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of Iowa in USA, spoke on the economics of development to a group of selected economists in Colombo last week.
Thenuwara’s enterprise was to revisit some of the established economic theories relating to economic growth and development and pinpoint the essential prerequisites which Sri Lanka has to put in place if it is to sustain its current initiative for attaining a rapid economic growth that would amaze the rest of the world and thereby earn Sri Lanka the title ‘The Wonder of Asia’.
Global action against climate change: The unfinished business with Durban summit
The failed Durban Summit
The much-hyped UN-sponsored global summit of some 194 nations in Durban, South Africa from the last week of November to the first week of December 2011 to come up with a consensual programme of action against the perceived threat of climate change ended up with ‘no action’ at all.
Why did the good-intentioned public intervention go wrong?
Plastic crates: Universally used in agri markets
In 2002, the writer had a chance of visiting a few farms in Czech Republic, some 200 kilometres away from its capital, Prague. They were all medium sized farms owned by private individuals producing such products as vegetables, fruits and honey.
At the time of the writer’s visit, the fresh vegetables – potatoes, turnips, cabbages, carrots, beetroots and beans – had been harvested, cleaned, sorted and packed in plastic crates ready to go out of the farm gate.
Sri Lanka’s choice by 2050: Go live in the sky and release land for agriculture!
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Dr Upali Wickremasinghe, formerly Professor of Economics at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura and presently Regional Advisor of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, left his audience with a fine piece of advice when he concluded the 10th Professor Sirisena Tilakaratna Memorial Oration last week in Colombo. Talking on an apt topic on ‘Sustainable Agriculture and Sustainable Development: Sri Lanka at the Crossroads’, he chose to be a normative economist, the body of economics that tells the world how it should be changed instead of just describing the existing status, and said that Sri Lankans should think of living vertically rather than horizontally if the country is to release the much needed land for sustaining its agriculture and, through that, sustaining its development efforts.
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