Sri Lanka: Some Aspects Of Economic Freedom

By Anushka Wijesinha –OCTOBER 26, 2017

Anushka Wijesinha

Good Morning ladies and gentleman, honourable State Minister Eran Wickramaratne, a lot of other familiar faces in the room, and of course the dynamic team at Advocata who have really taken this think tank from a start up to really making waves in the Sri Lankan think tank circuit.

It’s a real pleasure to be with you this morning and deliver a keynote at the Advocata and Fraser institute Economic Freedom Summit.

In my remarks to you today I’ll highlight some aspects of Economic freedom from my own perspective. They don’t neatly tie into the economic freedom index necessarily-my comments are a little broader- but you’ll realize through some of the running threads that they link up quite a bit with some of the elements of the Economic Freedom Index.

Much of these remarks will be from my own perspective, my own personal viewpoint. And some of they may find some resonance with you and try to provide food for thought for further discussion whether it’s for today’s proceedings, or for institutes like Advocata to take forward later on. It’s of course by no means an exhaustive discussion about economic freedom in Sri Lanka. I’m sure you’ll find many things you wish I had said, and you’ll find fault with me for that, but I’ll try and keep it to some perspectives for you to ponder on.

My keynote will be on three parts: part one is on policy orientations and the role of the state-might be an unusual point to start on given that this is a largely a free market discussion but I think it’s an important discussion to have on policy orientations and the role of the state, in part two I flag a few examples of contradictions or tensions in our economic debate where I think the lens of economic freedom needs to come in very strongly and very quickly that will enrich the debate here in Sri Lanka, and in part three my comments will be about how we can create and shape a popular narrative around economic freedom in our country.

Lets dive right into part one with a few thoughts on policy orientations and the role of the state. I must state upfront that I’m not a believer of absolutes, either blindly following that market forces can solve everything and we should just leave it to that, or that the state must overbearingly do everything because there are too many market failures. I think to be absolute in this debate will be missing the opportunity to make real change and really influence policy, but might be disconnected to the growing acknowledgement globally that there is a need for both the market and the state so long as we get the balance right. But hey, I guess that’s the big elephant in the room-getting that balance right- and we seem to have not gotten that balance right lately.

I recall a conversation that I had with the chief of UNIDO (United Nations International Development Organization) a year or so back. We were driving to the SLINTEC Nano tech facility in Homagama and we had a chance to chat. I asked him having seen so many policy orientations across the world with his work, what would his one piece of advice be to Sri Lanka. And he answered choose pragmatism over dogma. And he recalled, once again you might find it odd that in an economic freedom discussion we are referring to China- but this is just his remarks, he recalled Deng Xiaoping’s famous remarks —  “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice”.

So he went onto argue that for too long academics have been preoccupied with trying to classify development paradigms to neat, discrete categories. But given the complexity of our world today, the impatience of societies to prosper, and the pragmatism required of politicians, clinging on to particular ideologies may not help. Instead he argued whatever policies that can get the job done. In this case, gets the job done of expanding prosperity to more Sri Lankans is where the focus should be. So we need to be pragmatic about our policy mix but it certainly doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t focus on economic freedom — that should be our anchor.

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