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, states that in spite of the deflationary trend, Sri Lanka continues to deal with substantially high poverty levels that need to be addressed.Joining Ada Deranas present affairs program @Hydepark, he highlighted that to tackle hardship, Sri Lanka must focus on an economic growth plan that can take advantage of the necessary tools to attend to pushing issues.Commending the President for being practical and continuing to implement essential reforms, Dr.
Wignaraja stressed that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) program need to be made use of to develop prudent macroeconomic stability in the country.Speaking even more, Dr.
Wignaraja said: The outlook for this year in Sri Lanka is 5% development according to what the Central Bank state.
Inflation is now in fact in deflation - meaning price rate development is falling according to the numbers, but poverty stays very stubbornly high.
50% of Sri Lankans are said to be denied by the UNDPs multi-dimensional poverty index.
The World Bank estimates like quarter of our population is poor at the level of $365 a day.So the issue with this is that the household surveys are expensive and just come out in often.
So, what individuals do is they attempt to look at samples of population tell you a story and the story seems that the hardship numbers have actually remained stubbornly high at somewhere between 25% of the Sri Lankan population to 50%.
There may have been a bit of trending downwards with growth recovering in the Sri Lankan economy but there are pockets of hardship.
One huge problem is aging hardship, he expressed.For instance you know we are an aging population in Sri Lanka and majority our population will be over 60 years old very soon therefore this group are really poor especially ladies who are vulnerable and they have an issue since we dont have appropriate pension system, our welfare support services and agencies dont effectively cover people.
There are health concerns and after that there is this sad problem for me - child malnutrition.The unfortunate part is we dont really have the resources to handle all of this without appropriate development.
So were going to need to consider a development plan for Sri Lanka at the next stage of our development, Dr.
Wignaraja said.Commenting on 2025 Budget, Dr.
Wignaraja stated that he does not believe the this spending plan would really run down on the federal government coffers affecting growth trajectory for the nation as the opposition suggests, which the president is worthy of credit for being very pragmatic in what he has done.The president should have credit for being very practical in what he has done which is a continuity of policy broadly of Gotabaya Rajapaksa when he deserted the homegrown services and went to the IMF of Ranil Wickremesinghe who assisted bring around the turn-around throughout his time, but didnt enjoy the political dividend from that, Dr.
Wignaraja highlighted.In the budget with actually these three important pieces of legislation that are quite still in process and one encourages federal government to keep those pieces of legislation in location because you know the Indian example is the best uh case of this you know they went to the IMF many years back and they have never gone considering that and thats an excellent example so we need to use the IMF program as a way of building sensible macroeconomic stability.The second thing naturally is the digitization which I believe is terribly important you understand we really have to cut the ineffectiveness across public services and Public Service shipment and likewise the corruption rewards by digitization and I think thats very important, he included.