‘Sri Lanka Economic Forum 2016’, an initiative hosted by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and attended by international figures such as George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz and Ricardo Hausmann, is to kick off today at Cinnamon Grand Colombo.  
The two-day event, sponsored by the Open Society Foundations of the international investor and philanthropist George Soros, will see the presentation of a growth prognosis prepared by the Harvard Centre for International Development on Sri Lanka. 
The growth prognosis is said to have identified four key areas they believe are important to support sustained and inclusive long-term economic growth for Sri Lanka.
These areas are: macroeconomic and fiscal stability, structural transformation and competitiveness, urbanization and development and regional development and social inclusion. 
According to the event coordinator Niranjan Deva Aditya, the well-known Member of the European Parliament of Sri Lankan descent, the prognosis was prepared by a Harvard team that was in Sri Lanka prior to the forum for about a month, gathering information and having a first-hand experience of the country’s economic potential.
“Just three months after the Prime Minister was elected to his office and his economic policy statement in November, the leading economists in the world are coming here for a conference on how to develop Sri Lanka into its potential as a next Asian tiger,” Deva Aditya said. 
“All this is happening because of Ranil Wickremesinghe; the respect which he commands in the international community, in international economic circles and in places far afield, where Sri Lanka is known as a dim distant place,” he added. 
May it be Harvard, MIT or Oxford, according to Deva Aditya, Wickremesinghe’s commitment to sustainable and inclusive economic development, democracy and open government, has propelled interest in Sri Lanka.   
“Sri Lankan parents had to spend a lot of money to send their children to Harvard and it’s not easy to gain entrance. Now Harvard is coming to Sri Lanka. You can see the positive changes that are happening in the country in such a short period of time,” Deva Aditya noted.  Apart from Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Centre for International Development Director Ricardo Hausmann, the other economists and resource persons who are speaking at the forum are University of Cape Town Graduate School for Development Policy and Practice Director Alan Hirsch, Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy Associate Professor Robert F. Conrad, University of Warwick Professor of Economics Christopher Woodruff, Albania City of Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj, Harvard Kennedy School Associate Professor of Public Policy Filipe Campanile, Harvard University Centre for International Development Growth Lab Senior Research Fellow Ljubica Nedelkoska, Centre for International Development Growth Lab Research Fellow Frank Neffke, New York University Stern School of Business Visiting Professor Montek Singh Aluwalia and Macquarie University Department of Economics Associate Professor Sean Turnell.
The forum will be attended by over 300 top policy decision-makers representing mostly the public sector and a select number of private sector participants nominated by the business chambers in the country. 
The first day sessions will feature several panel discussions featuring Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, Soros, Stiglitz and other visiting economists. Several Sri Lankan economists -- Dr. W.A. Wijewardena, Prof. Sirimal Abeyratne, Dr. Nishan de Mel, Dr. Muthukrishna Sarvananthan, Murtaza Jafferjee and Prof. Razeen Sally -- will also feature in these panel discussions as panellists and moderators. 
The panel discussions will follow closed door interactive meetings attended by key Sri Lankan policymakers. The second day of the forum that features a youth forum will allow 100 selected Sri Lankan youth to exchange ideas with the visiting economists. 
An evaluation process carried out by the Harvard Centre for International Development on the participants will later select 20 of them to be taken to Harvard for further training for about a couple of months. 
“They can either be senior government officials, young economists or even private sector businessmen. The idea is, with their training, they can better serve Sri Lanka,” Deva Aditya said. 
“Like with the forum, all expenses for this will be borne by George Soros and his Open Society Foundations,” he added. 
George Soros is the founder and Chairman of Open Society—a network of foundations, partners and projects in more than 100 countries. 
His commitment to the idea of open society—where rights are respected, government is accountable and no one has the monopoly on the truth—makes the Open Society Foundations unlike any other private philanthropic effort in history. 
Soros began his philanthropy in 1979, giving scholarships to black South Africans under apartheid. In the 1980s, he helped undermine communism in the Eastern Bloc by providing Xerox machines to copy banned texts and supporting cultural exchanges with the West. 
Soros helped establish an international system to bring transparency and accountability to the natural resource extraction industries, whose practice of making secret payoffs to local tyrants has for decades fuelled some of the world’s worst political unrest and most heinous violence. He has supported independent organisations such as Global Witness, the International Crisis Group, European Council on Foreign Relations and Institute for New Economic Thinking.