‘Business community should ensure steady progress’ :

Peaceful environment spurs economy

Sanjeevi JAYASURIYA

The country’s economy is expected to grow with the peaceful environment that facilitates the growth potential. The business community needs to be proactive and dynamic to ensure steady progress in achieving economic prosperity, National Chamber of Commerce of Sri Lanka President Lal de Alwis told Daily News Business.

The SME sector is an important component in development and it should play a vital role. In countries such as Japan 99 percent of the GDP growth is contributed by the SME sector. The importance of the sectoral growth has also been stressed in the Mahinda Chinthana, he said.

The development work carried out in the North and the East would add to the economic development and people would benefit immensely by the projects such as infrastructure development including road network, power and water, he said.

The development of business and industry will be part and parcel for economic development. The country in the recent past had to face several local and international unfavourable developments.

During the early part of 2008, the food and energy crisis in the global economy threatened Sri Lanka’s macro economic stability by widening the trade and current account deficits and rising inflation, he said.

In the latter part of the year, the second wave of the global financial crisis turned into an unprecedented global financial turmoil from September 2008. Sri Lanka had to cope with its share of sudden withdrawals of foreign capital by supplying almost 50 percent of its external official reserves which had been accumulated to the highest level of US$ 3.56 billion by end July 2008, he said.

Apart from these unfavourable conditions, the industry also had to face two other problems - escalating energy cost and high bank interest rates. With these, our products became uncompetitive both in the local and global markets. However, the reduction of interest rates has provided relief to the business community, he said.

The Government should create an environment conducive for business sector development and introduce business sector friendly policies so that the business sector will find it easy to do their activities, he said.