Export Growth: The Challenge of Poor Logistics

Over the last 50 years, the civil conflict, a dramatic decline in terms of trade, demographic pressures and misguided policies were major contributory factors to Sri Lanka’s economic underperformance. The current prospects are significantly more propitious not only because of the absence of major ‘drags’ on the economy but also due to favourable economic geography (previous Economic Alerts have elaborated on this). The government has set a growth target of 8% in the medium term. It also aims to double per capita GDP to over $4,000 by 2016. This would require average annual real growth rates in double digits.