Public Lecture #6 Prof Robert Lawrence on Path to Prosperity : Protectionism or Free Trade?
Delivered on 8 February 2017, this lecture by Prof. Robert Z. Lawrence, the Albert L. Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a former member of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, confronted Sri Lanka’s post-liberalisation drift back toward protectionism. Lawrence laid out the historical arc plainly: while the late 1970s had been defined by trade liberalisation, Sri Lanka had since steadily rebuilt trade protection as a tool for import substitution and local industry promotion, to the point that by 2017 the country’s effective rate of protection had returned to levels comparable to the 1980s — undoing much of the earlier reform through what Lawrence characterised as a complex, unpredictable web of para-tariffs layered on top of standard customs duties. Framed around the stark binary in its title, the lecture argued that protecting local businesses from foreign competition and pursuing genuine free trade were fundamentally incompatible growth strategies, and that Sri Lanka’s continued reliance on an opaque, unpredictable tariff structure was actively undermining the export competitiveness and investment predictability the country needed to grow. The main highlight was Lawrence bringing his deep, globally-informed expertise on trade policy — drawn from decades advising the World Bank, OECD, and multiple US administrations — to bear directly on Sri Lanka’s specific tariff architecture, giving local policymakers a rigorous, comparative case for dismantling para-tariffs rather than expanding them further.
