The 14th annual Sri Lanka Economic Summit which scheduled to be held from July 9-11, 2013 in Colombo will have one of its sessions discussing about Sri Lanka's export strategy.
The Government policy framework has targeted to raise the rate of growth in exports to double that of GDP growth, but exports as a % of GDP have halved from year 2000 to 2012. The share of exports of Sri Lanka as a percentage of world exports has also declined over the years to reach 0.06% by 2011. The basket of merchandise exports from Sri Lanka as well as our exports markets have remained largely unchanged over the last few decades. The foregoing situation and change in the global economic scenario, with Asia gaining ground over the West, require us to rethink our export strategy given the importance of exports to a small economy targeting to achieve sustained high economic growth in the future.
Leading economists and key exporters have been invited to discuss and identify changes required to current strategy to rejuvenate the exports sector in Sri Lanka.
The keynote note speaker of this session will be Dr. Premachandra Athukorala, Professor of Economics at the Australian National University and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow at the University Of Manchester, UK.
