Aging population and child malnutrition pose challenges for Sri Lanka’s economy: Expert
FAILING TO LEVERAGE INDIA’S GROWTH WILL BE HARMFUL – DR. GANESHAN WIGNARAJA WITH INDEEWARI AMUWATTE
Visiting Senior Fellow at ODI Global in the United Kingdom and former Director of Research at the Asian Development Bank Institute in Tokyo, Dr. Ganeshan Wignaraja, says that despite the deflationary trend, Sri Lanka continues to face considerably high poverty levels that must be addressed.
Joining Ada Derana’s current affairs program ‘@Hydepark’, he emphasized that to tackle poverty, Sri Lanka must focus on an economic growth plan that can leverage the necessary tools to address pressing issues.
Commending the President for being pragmatic and continuing to implement essential reforms, Dr. Wignaraja stressed that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) program should be utilized to establish prudent macroeconomic stability in the country.
Speaking further, Dr. Wignaraja said: “The outlook for this this year in Sri Lanka is 5% growth according to what the Central Bank say. Inflation is now actually in deflation – meaning price rate growth is falling according to the numbers, but poverty remains very stubbornly high. 50% of Sri Lankans are said to be deprived by the UNDP’s multi-dimensional poverty index. The World Bank estimates like quarter of our population is poor at the level of $365 a day.”
“So the problem with this is that the household surveys are expensive and only come out in frequently. So, what what people do is they try to look at samples of population tell you a story and the story appears to be that the poverty numbers have remained stubbornly high at somewhere between 25% of the Sri Lankan population to 50%. There may have been a little bit of trending downwards with growth recovering in the Sri Lankan economy but there are pockets of poverty. One big issue is old age poverty”, he expressed.
“For instance you know we are an aging population in Sri Lanka and more than half our population will be over 60 years old very very soon and so this group are very poor particularly women who are vulnerable and they have an issue because we don’t have proper pension system, our welfare support services and agencies don’t adequately cover people. There are health issues and then there is this sad issue for me – child malnutrition.”
“The sad part is we don’t really have the resources to deal with all of this without proper growth. So we’re going to have to think of a growth plan for Sri Lanka at the next phase of our development”, Dr. Wignaraja said.
Commenting on 2025 Budget, Dr. Wignaraja stated that he does not think the this budget would really run down on the government coffers impacting growth trajectory for the country as the opposition suggests, and that the president deserves credit for being very pragmatic in what he has done.
“The president deserves credit for being very pragmatic in what he has done which is a continuity of policy broadly of Gotabaya Rajapaksa once he abandoned the homegrown solutions and went to the IMF of Ranil Wickremesinghe who helped bring around the turnaround during his time, but didn’t reap the political dividend from that”, Dr. Wignaraja highlighted.
“In the budget with really these three important pieces of legislation that are very much still in process and one encourages government to keep those pieces of legislation in place because you know the Indian example is the best uh case of this you know they went to the IMF many years ago and they have never gone since and that’s a very good example so we must use the IMF program as a way of building prudent macroeconomic stability.”
“The second thing of course is the digitization which I think is terribly important you know we really have to cut the inefficiency across public services and Public Service delivery and also the corruption incentives by digitization and I think that’s very important”, he added.