Drawing more FDI: Strategy or wishful thinking?

“WOULD you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

- By Sarath De Alwis

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where—” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.Although Lewis Carroll claimed that his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were for children it offers eminently logical commonsense for politicians and specifically for Executive Presidents brazenly brave in utopian pursuits of making lives beautiful for all in a land of plenty.

On its front page of Wednesday 26 January, the Daily FT had four news reports relating to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The captions and contents of the four new reports convinced me that on FDI, this Government is well and truly lost in a wonderland. At least, Alice had the smile of the Cheshire Cat.

In the first, BOI Chairman Arjuna Herath has emphatically pronounced “Without concessions, Sri Lanka needs hard reforms to attract FDI”

Speaking at a Nations Trust Bank forum the BOI Chairman has said “Sri Lanka does not have the fiscal space to match concession-heavy regimes deployed by larger and better-capitalised economies, and must instead build competitiveness through lower costs, policy certainty and institutional efficiency. Herath said attracting investment would depend on creating a predictable and credible framework rather than relying on incentives the country cannot afford.”