[ISL] "Sri Lanka Wants to Be the Next Singapore as War Legacy Fades"

[rfmcdonald]

Anusha Ondaatjie and Tom Lasseter at Bloomberg report about Sri Lanka's interest in moving on. Can it?

Sri Lanka is moving past its history of ethnic strife and seeking to emulate Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai as one of the region’s premier trading and financial hubs, a senior ruling party lawmaker said.

“Our focus entirely is going to be on creating the most competitive economy in this part of the world,” Harsha de Silva, who helped draft the United National Party’s economic policy, said in an interview in Colombo on Wednesday. “We are going to have to play in a different league.”

The UNP won the most seats in an election on Monday after pledging to create jobs and heal wounds stemming from a bloody civil war that ended in 2009. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, the party’s leader, will probably be appointed to lead the government for another term later this week.

The ruling party wants to revive growth that slowed to a two-year low with moves to make it easier for the private sector to do business. It has also pledged to avoid discriminatory policies that may stoke tensions between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority.

[. . .]

Sri Lanka’s challenges to compete with Asia’s economic powerhouses are immense: Loss-making state-owned firms dominate an economy four times smaller than Singapore that relies mostly on tourism and exports. Access to financing, an inefficient bureaucracy and tax issues are the top impediments for Sri Lankan businesses, according to the World Economic Forum.