In many countries water supply is a service that is seriously underpriced, especially for residential consumers. This has led to a call for setting cost recovery policies to ensure that the tariffs charged for water supply cover the full cost of providing for the service. Yet, the question...

The world is faced with considerable risk and uncertainty about climate change. Particular attention has been paid increasingly to hydropower generation in recent years because it is renewable energy. However, hydropower is among the most vulnerable industries to changes in global and regional...

Inequalities in access to education pose a significant barrier to development. It has been argued that this reflects, in part, borrowing constraints that inhibit private investment in human capital by the poor. One promise of the recent proposals to open international labor markets to allow for...

Traditional risk assessments use asset losses as the main metric to measure the severity of a disaster. This paper proposes an expanded risk assessment based on a framework that adds socioeconomic resilience and uses wellbeing losses as the main measure of disaster severity. Using an agent-based...

This paper uses data from the National Financial Inclusion Survey 2018 to understand the determinants of financial inclusion in Sri Lanka and their significance for inclusive growth. The findings highlight that gender, education, and formal employment are important determinants of financial...

Although Sri Lanka has made significant progress in social and economic development over the past decade, the Northern and Eastern provinces that faced the brunt of the decades-long conflict remain disproportionately poor. To understand the labor market dimensions of poverty in these regions,...

Governments are challenged to balance multiple policy goals and make difficult choices when selecting infrastructure projects for public investment, particularly since available funds are often insufficient to implement the full suite of proposals. This paper presents the application of the...

Many microenterprises in developing countries have high returns to capital, but also face risky revenue streams. In principle, equity offers several advantages over debt when financing investments of this nature, but the use of equity in practice has been largely limited to investments in much...

Country-level census data are typically collected once every 10 years. However, conflict, migration, urbanization, and natural disasters can cause rapid shifts in local population patterns. This study uses Sri Lankan data to demonstrate the feasibility of a bottom-up method that combines...

This paper quantifies the contributions to poverty reduction observed in Sri Lanka between 2002 and 2012/13. The methods adopted for the analysis generate entire counterfactual distributions to account for the contributions of demographics, labor, and non-labor incomes in explaining poverty...