Sri Lanka Port City still at risk of incompetent regulators: Samarajiva

Economy Next: Sri Lanka’s China-backed Colombo Port City, which has attempted to cut through a regulatory morass that is holding back the rest of the country via a fast-track ‘single window’ law is still at risk of delays from incompetent regulators, a top policy specialist has warned.

Rohan Samarajiva, the founder of LIRNEasia, a regional policy research body and former regulator of Sri Lanka’s telecom sector who carried out an extensive de-regulation, says the state ends up regulatory activities of citizens in multiple ways.

“We talk about regulators as some special breed but quite a lot of what the government does is regulations,” Samarajiva said at a seminar organized by Advocata Institute, a Colombo based think tank.

“The difference is that there are entities that do formal explicit regulations, rule-bound; and there are those that can say yes or no therefore regulate but don’t necessarily do in that in a formalized manner.”

Limiting Discretion

Regulations become unclear to investors and the general public and also lead to corruption where there is room or discretion for officials to vary decisions. Delaying decisions also make it difficult to get anything done at all.

“I believe it important to make regulations more efficient and the whole essence of regulations is something called discretion – that is the ability to say yes or no,” Samarajiva said.

“To bound that and to limit that. Of course, you have to say yes or no but to bind it.”

The Port City bill was passed to cut regulatory barriers through a ‘single window’ for investment approvals as the government was called upon to start a state regulator for beauty pageants by people who believe the coercive state with a broken public sector is better at it.

“Why is this concept important? To do any one thing you can ask how many steps you must go through and places you have to go through and any of those places can slow you down due to incompetence,” explained Samarajiva.

“When you talk about the basic concept of greater Colombo Economic Commission law from 1978, the BOI and all the work that was done in the last few years on improvising Sri Lanka’s position in the ease of doing business index; all these hinge on a central concept that is the ‘single window’.

“The whole point of all these activities – I’m not saying it is unique to the Port City bill – but the whole point of all these is the single window concept of simplifying things for the investor.”

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