Sri Lanka defaulted on repayment of its external public debt in April-May 2022 for the first time in its history and was the first Asian country to do so in the past quarter century. This Working Paper provides an incisive account of the repeated blunders made by successive Governors as well as...

This is a response to the Briefing Paper entitled Evolution of Chinese Lending to Sri Lanka since the mid-2000s – Separating Myth from Reality, written by Umesh Moramudali and Thilina Panduwawala published by the China-Africa Research Initiative of the School of Advanced International Studies...

This is a critical analysis of and critical reflections on the Performance Audit Report (PAR) of the National Audit Office on the arts stream education at senior secondary school and university undergraduate level in Sri Lanka. The PAR claims that arts stream education has failed to produce...

This research paper compares and contrasts development outcomes of ‘traditional' or ‘old' and ‘emerging' or ‘new' sources of international development finance in Sri Lanka during the ceasefire time (2002-2005) when it depended on former sources and the post-civil war period (2009-2012)...

Three core objectives of the GSP are poverty reduction, promotion of ‘sustainable development' and ‘good governance' in beneficiary countries. Though what ‘good governance' specifically means is defined clearly (ratification and effective implementation of 16 core conventions on human and...

The Northern Province of Sri Lanka is emerging out of a protracted and devastating civil war between July 1983 and May 2009, during which time almost one hundred thousand people died, a majority of them civilians, up to eight hundred thousand people were internally displaced, and another two...

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the economic background to the ceasefire agreement, economic dividends during the time of ceasefire (2002-2005) and the economic impact of the resumption of the conflict in December 2005. The period covered in this paper is 2000-2007. A brief overview of...

There are gainers and losers in every economic policy instrument. Policymakers would tend to choose economic policies as a result of which the gainers are expected to be greater than the losers. Thus, every economic policy instrument may have implications for income inequality and poverty. The...

This paper assesses poverty in the conflict-affected Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka using hitherto unavailable data due to the protracted civil war. Past four years of ceasefire has generated data that enabled the materialisation of this paper. The main arguments of this paper are...

This is an anthology of three articles on the civil war and economy in Sri Lanka. Two articles focus on the national economy during the 2000-2007 period, while the third one focuses on the feasibility of a separate economy in the Eastern and Northern Provinces of Sri Lanka