Net interest margin (NIM) is an indicator of the level of efficiency of financial intermediation by banks. This study analyses the determinants of NIMs of domestic banks of Sri Lanka for the period of January 2002 to March 2011 based on the model developed by Ho and Saunders and its extensions...

An openness-led growth hypothesis investigates the causal relationship between trade openness1 and economic growth. Indeed, trade openness can stimulate economic growth by enhancing the international flow of knowledge and innovation and by allowing economies of specialization, not only in the...

Political conflict in developing countries has been a topical issue in recent development literature. While the sources of political conflict encompass a wide range of disciplinary areas, the preoccupation with the ethnocentric perspectives on the issue appears to have concealed the importance...

A high and sustained economic growth in conjunction with low inflation is the central objective of macroeconomic policy formulation in both developed and developing countries. Further, studying inflationary processes is an important issue in the current scenario as it allows policy-makers to...

One of the main objectives of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is to facilitate world’s trade and production. It enforces legally binding multilateral agreements on trade in goods, services and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. The Trade Related Intellectual...

Exports affect economic growth through several channels. It is argued that not only the volume of exports but what you export also matters to growth. This article investigates the effect of exports and export composition on the economic growth process in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s exporting...

The purpose of this article is to examine the role of Indo-Lanka Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in integration of Sri Lanka into the Indian manufacturing processes in line with emerging trade patterns based on ‘global product sharing’. While Sri Lanka has established close economic ties...

This article investigates the importance of capital assets in moving out of poverty by reviewing the Samurdhi (Prosperity) Development Programme (SDP) implemented to eradicate poverty of Sri Lanka in 1995. One hundred and seventy beneficiaries from a randomly selected sample of the Ratnapura...

Many economists have argued that prolonged fiscal expansions contribute to current account imbalances. The purpose of this paper is to explore this phenomenon in the case of Sri Lanka during the period 1970 to 2003. In this study, the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and the bounds...

This article tests the validity of a Forward Discount Bias Puzzle, in a small open developing economy (SODE)—Sri Lanka—by employing first an unstructured vector autoregression (VAR) model and then a structured VAR model. The author argues that empirical examinations concerning...