Rethinking Sri Lanka’s industrialisation strategy: Achievements, lost opportunities and prospects

Prema-chandra Athukorala

Departmental Working Papers from The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the contemporary policy debate in Sri Lanka on industrialization strategy by analysing policy regime shifts and their outcome in terms of export performance, growth and employment during the post-independence era. The analysis is guided by the received body of knowledge relating to the challenges faced by a small economy that takes world prices as given and is unable to affect world demand and supply in designing national industrialisation strategy in this era of economic globalization. The findings demonstrates that the backlash against liberalization reforms in the contemporary Sri Lankan policy debate is largely based on ideological predilections rather factual analysis. The comparative analysis of Sri Lanka’s industrialization experience during the state-led import-substitution era and that of the post-reform era (in particular during the first two decades) makes a strong case for reconsidering the merit of the emerging emphasis on combining import substitution with export orientation with a sector specific focus. Selective policies to promote import substitution essentially impose a ‘tax’ on export producers.

Keywords: industrialization; trade policy; foreign direct investment; economic globalisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O14 O24 O25 O53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://acde.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/fil ... hukorala_2021_14.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Rethinking Sri Lanka's Industrialization Strategy: Achievements, Lost Opportunities and Prospects (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pas:papers:2021-14

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Prema-chandra Athukorala ().