By Shamindra Ferdinando The Sri Lanka Institute of Directors (SLID) and Transparency International Sri Lanka (TISL) recently declared corruption as the root cause of Sri Lanka’s current political and economic crisis. The declaration was made in a statement titled, “SLID and TISL launch ‘Business Against Corruption’ Initiative” issued to the media after the two organisations […]

(Al Jazeera) Workers at the United Kingdom’s largest container port have begun what they say will be an eight-day strike, becoming the latest workers in the country to take action to demand higher pay amid rising inflation and the soaring cost of living.Nearly 2,000 workers at the Port of Felixstowe, which handles about four million containers a […]

Beijing [China], August 12 (ANI): Recent protests in China’s Henan province underline the risks being faced by banks as the real estate sector continues to struggle. The real estate sector in China accounts for around 24 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), almost a quarter of the nation’s GDP, according to authors Ahana Roy […]

Thursday 18th August 2022 Speculation is rife that former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is planning to return to Sri Lanka. The question, however, is not whether he is coming, but what he is doing overseas. The anti-government protesters who engineered his ouster called upon him to ‘go home’; they did not ask him to flee the […]

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s two years in office – a period of unprecedented political turmoil, uncertainty and further deterioration of Parliament – should be thoroughly examined. In fact, the UNP, with the support of the then President Maithripala Sirisena, paved the way for Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s candidature, at the 2019 presidential election, by blocking Mahinda Rajapaksa’s path […...

After the collapse of the Sri Lankan economy, attention has turned to the state of affairs in other South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bhutan and Bangladesh. All three countries have either curtailed imports or are planning to do so, to salvage their fast-depleting foreign exchange reserves and avoid a Lanka-like forex crisis. While the […]

by Chandre Dharmawardana, chandre.dharma@yahoo.ca. The forex crisis had forced the government to jettison its initial set of economic managers of the Central bank who looked for home-grown solutions and opposed dealing with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The President re-instated a set of managers whose ideas were more orthodox and aligned with the neo-liberal bankers […]

Calls for unity in a country torn apart by nationalism and monetary instability

By Kalinga Tudor Silva One of the important ways, the current economic crisis in Sri Lanka has directly impacted our lives is having to go through long and seeming unending queues, to access petrol, diesel, kerosene and even our dear passports. Queues have multiplied, sprung up on either side of the road and across the […]

Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka housed ousted President Gotabaya Rajapaksa following the recent crisis, until he was forced to flee the country entirely. That continues a trend of the city, and especially its strategic deep-sea port, being in the news for all the wrong reasons. In 2017, when Sri Lanka found itself struggling to make […]

Global un-employment set to rise

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) says Sri Lanka’s growth is forecast to contract by 7.6% in 2022 and economic activity will remain subdued in 2023.In its latest Asian Development Outlook Supplement, the ADB said the island nation is beset with multifaceted and deepening challenges emanating from long-standing fiscal and current account deficits that have led to […]

For the majority of the troubled economies of the global South, it will be a case of narrowing foreign policy options. For many of these countries, the IMF is ‘the banker of last resort’ and this generally means that they would need to be ‘in the good books’ of the chief financiers of the IMF; […]

International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva says the economic crisis in Sri Lanka is a warning sign to the rest of the world.Speaking to G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in Indonesia, Georgieva said that the global economic outlook has darkened significantly, and uncertainty is exceptionally high. “Downside risks about which the […]