10 May 2018 11:00 am
Delivering a lecture titled ‘Singapore’s Development Experience: Lessons for Sri Lanka’, Gamani Corea Foundation Director Research and Adjunct Professor to National University of Singapore Professor Tilak Abeysinghe highlighted that political stability, quality of governance combined with a collective vision rather than an individual’s vision was the mixture for the Sri Lankan economy to take off.
Hence, he said the term limits on the executive presidency need to be removed to allow a determinant leader to focus on long-term economic prospects for the country.
Abeysinghe noted that non-economic factors matter more than economic factors in the developing process.
Drawing lessons from Singapore’s development experience, he said that the top four crucial non-economic factors are: political stability and quality of governance, national security, politicians with high opportunity cost and geopolitics.
“Either a single-party rule for a sustained period or a common agreement on an economic agenda is needed to set the vision beyond a single (five-year) political term. Focus on the long-run, not on what is politically expedient.”
Abeysinghe also stressed that while the political stability is needed for the economy to take-off, the quality of governance is required to maintain the altitude.
He further said that the government should leave the economy on the hands of the private sector while limiting its role to providing macroeconomic stability.
He stressed that the quality of governance emerges through that type of economic and political system in place. Hence, he pointed out that a private sector-driven open economy could act as a mechanism in disciplining the forces in government bureaucracy.
Abeysinghe also asserted that the openness to trade and investments exert a disciplining effect on the regime while enhancing growth, improving quality of governance and lowering the probability of ethnic conflicts, regardless whether it’s a democracy or an authoritarian regime.
However, sharing her observations, Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka (IPS) Executive Director Dr. Dushni Weerakoon noted that considering the socio-politic dynamics of Sri Lanka, being a South Asian country with a large rural community, who are dependent on agriculture, the political structure and quality of the government of Singapore cannot be replicated in Sri Lanka.
Referring to the GINI index, Weerakoon also pointed out that Singapore has one of the highest income inequalities in the world, which is caused by its taxation system due to the absence of capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes along with low income taxes and limited welfare spending.
“Sri Lanka has to learn from others but it needs to work under its own unique terms to adopt its own economic model,” Abeysinghe responded. (NF)