Author: Rohan Samarajiva

Feb 10, 2014 (LBO) – SriLankan Airlines is expected to lose 25 billion rupees in 2013-14. In the previous year, it lost 22 billion rupees. This annual loss by one state-owned enterprise is more than double the amount doled out by the government in one year as Samurdhi payments. The Lakvijaya coal-fired power station in […]

Feb 06, 2014 (LBO) Each violent death is one too many. When it is senseless, when the victim is innocent,young and full of potential it hurts even more. When the victim is like us, we empathize. The phenomenon looks large and frightening. We feel we are in the midst of carnage. We perceive a collapse […]

Feb 02, 2014 (LBO) – On the morning of the first Sunday of February 2014 I felt as though the ground I stood on suddenly disappeared. I learned from a tweet that my friend and leading economic journalist Mel Gunasekera had been murdered in her home. online pharmacy buy abilify with best prices today in […]

Dec 23, 2013 (LBO) – I travel on a Sri Lanka passport. The hassle is so great that I regret not getting another passport. My life was made simpler, for a short time, by the wonderful one-year SAARC visa that allowed me visa-free access to our neighboring countries. I still have it, but now it […]

Nov 14, 2013 (LBO) – My children made their own decisions on what to study and where. But when I found that my son was about to complete his undergraduate education without taking a single course in economics, I pleaded that he should. It was not that I wanted him to be an economist, but […]

Nov 11, 2013 (LBO) I was in Fiji a few weeks back. Opening the morning paper, I was struck by a news story which said that the productivity of the Suva and Lautoka container terminals had increased by 35 percent, even before the new shore cranes had arrived. Good The cause: Sri Lanka’s Aitken Spence […]

Sept 20, 2013 (LBO) – One of the worst things this administration has done is double the size of the government work force. buy elavil online https://qpharmacorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/png/elavil.html no prescription pharmacy One of the best things the short-lived Ranil Wickremesinghe administration did in 2002-04 was to freeze government appointments in the face of an economic crisis […]

Aug 29, 2013 (LBO) – The following was written as a framing document for the 49th LBO-LBR CEO Forum, held on 27th August 2013. How would you reimagine higher education? Is it centrally planned by the Ministry and the University Grants Commission, or is it a result of decentralized initiative? Imagination is unlimited. But to […]

Aug 27, 2013 (LBO) I grew up in nationalistic times. The talk was of prosperity driven by oil from Pesalai and fertilizer from Eppawala. We were told that we were not capturing the value of tea and rubber, because we were exporting them without adding value. Western imperialists were still in control, extracting most of […]

Aug 13, 2013 (LBO) – I had a civilized debate on Facebook with a good friend on whether Chinese ownership of the new container terminal at the just inaugurated Colombo South Harbor. He had, in a newspaper interview, called the new port China’s Colombo South Harbor, not our harbor. online pharmacy buy wellbutrin with best […]

July 18, 2013 (LBO) – The Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) is my favorite among all the surveys done by the government. Where else do you get information as granular as how much Kelawalla fish people buy? Given the ICT Agency’s stated commitment to open data, I was expecting data in Excel at least, […]

July 01, 2013 (LBO) Three days in Shanghai is surely not enough to understand what makes China tick. But as I sit in the new Pudong International Airport looking across the runway at the big cargo ships on the adjacent Yangtze River head out to sea or into port, I sort of get the value […]