Why aren’t more of our women working?

Eran Wickremaratne talks to the National Chambers of Commerce

 

January 23, 2016, 4:38 pm

First of all, I would like to say congratulations; the chamber has had a long and successful history. Looking at the various people who headed the Chamber in the past, their life stories are an inspiration to people in this country. We have very few biographies written of Sri Lankans, and those written are unfortunately mostly about politicians. I hope that some of the biographies of those mentioned today are written, to inspire the younger generation with stories on entrepreneurship and innovation. We have a history on other subjects but we need to write a history on commerce for others to learn from.

As you know, our government is only about five months old, even though we have a new President who has just completed a year. As we look ahead and craft government policy, a big issue we face is the relatively unfavourable global economic environment. We have come into government at a time when the world economy has slowed down. If you look at our overseas markets, they are becoming somewhat stagnant. Thus the challenges are great. We talked for the last two decades about the rise of Asia, particularly China and India, and we have just passed that point at which the growth curve is slowing down. That situation is not going to change very quickly, and we are looking at an adjustment period of another 18 months at least. Our government, whilst committed to small and medium enterprises, wants the private sector to drive economic growth. This represents a departure from the last 10 years, where the engine of growth was the public sector, and driven through a public sector investment programme equating roughly six to 7% of GDP. However, this picture has changed not for dogmatic reasons, but partly due to the external environment.

One of the reforms we are undertaking is on land. When we were teenagers, when we talked about land issues and land ownership, we actually meant land reform. That is, taking over land from private owners and transferring it to the state. We have come full circle, and across the world land ownership or adding a balance sheet to the household - not just income but a net asset - becomes an engine to drive growth. As you know, there are very few who have freehold land ownership in this country. Even if you go to a big city in Sri Lanka, it is only in the metropolitan centre of that city that people actually have freehold land; everyone else is on some kind of permit. We have decided to change that situation through widespread land ownership. We will embark on that by giving freehold ownership to those already on government schemes, and widen it thereafter. We expect to have 1.5 million new landholders by the end of this programme. Those with small businesses, micro-enterprises, or in self-employment, can access finance with not just with an income, but with a balance sheet, following this radical move.

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