Government must resign itself to reforms – now
Dhananath Fernando
20, February 2022
6 min read
Originally appeared on The Morning
By Dhananath Fernando
My school Advanced Level biology teacher used to tell me how to study for exams. Her main advice was that the first step was to ‘make a decision to study’. I would think to myself, ‘Haven’t we all decided that we need to study?’
But she would explain the power of decision making, which applied everytime we make a decision – be it consciously or unconsciously – and mention life every time we had to make a decision: “Not making a decision is a decision. Thinking to ourselves to study later is also a decision. Studying now is a decision. Not studying is also a decision.”
I realised that it’s all about the thousands of decisions that we make everyday. All of our destinations will be determined by such small decisions. What we are today is based on the decisions that we made in the past; what we will be tomorrow is based on decisions we make today.
The same lesson applies to our economic policy as well. It appears that our policymakers have made a decision to not make any decisions on the public policy front. Since the initial stages of Covid-19, multiple reports have been submitted by experts and the Government has even called for multiple reports on the current economic situation. There was an initial report by the Pathfinder Foundation which focused solely on the pandemic. Then a ‘Road Map for Economic Recovery’ was launched by the Advocata Institute.
In fact, the President called for a deregulation report, which was chaired by Krishan Balendran and Lalith Weeratunga. Suggestions were handed over by the Delegation of German Industry and Commerce (1) to the Deregulation Committee. There were many other suggestions and ideas by many other stakeholders, including the Chamber of Commerce, on the brewing economic crisis. It was recently reported that the Pathfinder Foundation submitted another report to the Minister of Finance based on the findings of a tripartite discussion between experts from Sri Lanka, Japan, and India.
After all these suggestions, the decision to delay reforms may have multiple reasons, of which which we can only guess. But keeping assumptions aside, the more we delay, the closer we get pinned to the wall with limited choices to escape from the crisis.
Economic reforms must always be looked at in a political context. Whether the present political power balance supports the reforms is a key question. While many are of the view that with a two-thirds majority reforms can be done, it seems otherwise. Reforms are going to be quite painful so it seems that policymakers are reluctant to push hard reforms, as they are scared that the citizens’ frustration during the reform period may dilute the political capital they enjoy. Further, this may even cause them to lose the super-majority.
Even the Minister of Finance has admitted that the State sector and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) are a massive burden to Government coffers; yet no State sector reform programme is even on the table. Politics is obviously the concern of the Government and State sector employees and their families are a massive voter bloc. Some of them would lose their jobs or would be pushed into mandatory retirement which would not help politics at the ground level. So reforms are put on the back burner and the Government continues to procrastinate.
On the other front, the more that we delay reforms, the more the people get frustrated with disturbances to their regular day-to-day activities and businesses, including shortages of essentials such as LP gas, fuel, milk powder, cement, etc. The Government is stuck between a rock and a hard place – whether it carries out reforms or not, its popular support and political capital will be diluted either way. Therefore, my view is that it is better to bite the bullet and carry out reforms, as procrastination is just going to make things worse in the long run.
Another reason that reforms are delayed could be that the energy and focus of policymakers and politicians is spent mainly on fire-fighting day-to-day micro-problems. The situation is such that everyday has become a challenge for the Government to find US Dollars for importing basics and debt repayments.
Weather conditions impacting hydropower generation and global crude oil prices reaching nearly $ 100 a barrel are making our crisis worse. So far our policymakers’ strategy has been to completely depend on swaps.
Over the last few weeks, India provided us with swaps and credit lines worth $ 1.5 billion and China with another Yuan 10 billion (approximately $ 1.5 b), of which basic information such as interest rates and payment conditionality has yet to be published. Interestingly, the total amount of swaps and credit lines are equivalent to six times the value of the MCC Grant, which created an extensive social discussion on the attached binding conditions which caused the President to appoint a committee to evaluate the grant agreement.
But our economic crisis is such that we are extremely desperate for foreign exchange. We had a presidential commission for a mere $ 480 million grant at a time when people had a deeper sensitivity to the potential conditions, whereas now we have decided to borrow six times more than that without any political party, media, or public figure having voiced their concerns.
The decisions available at hand for all political parties are limited and difficult. It has come down to simply having the courage to implement reforms. Politics or party lines have become irrelevant as the prescription will not change regardless of the person in the driver’s seat.
Since 1977 and 1990 there has been no effort for any hard economic reforms, so many policymakers think that hard reforms will dilute their popularity. As a result, procrastination on reforms has become the norm. At the same time, the practice and knowhow of driving reforms have not been common. But the truth is that reforms will have less damage on political capital, while not undertaking reforms will have far more serious consequences. Stagnation won’t take us anywhere, but reforms will.
References
The opinions expressed are the author’s own views. They may not necessarily reflect the views of the Advocata Institute or anyone affiliated with the institute.
