Trade, taxes and debt repayment in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to estimate the cost of taxing the export, import or domestic sectors of Sri Lanka for the purpose of reducing the national debt. A simple GNP model is used to estimate the elasticities that characterise the three aggregate sectors and are used to simulate the effects of taxing for debt servicing. The results show that a tax on the import sector generates the largest net savings on trade balance and that the savings from not importing can be substantial. However, for the period 1977-87 a 10.0 per cent tax on the import sector caused a decline in the growth of the economy by 3.0 per cent. The burden of the tax falls heavily on the domestic sector in terms of lost production and increased unemployment.

The linear and non-linear relationship between of tourism demand and output per worker: A study of Sri Lanka

“…Furthermore, the sector contributes 11.1%, 10.0% and 21.3% to GDP (gross domestic product), employment and exports, respectively (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2015). Gordon & Rankaduwa, 1992), textiles, institutions, other hard infrastructure (Chaffai, Kinda, & Plane, 2012), foreign remittances (Siddique, Selvanathan, & Selvanathan, 2012), tea products, transportation services and rubber-based products (Samaranayake, Lantra, & Jayawardena, 2013) which are crucial for growth and development of the country. Additionally, noting that a country's growth prospect can be explained by a number of factors and some of them are specific to each country, we hypothesise that tourism for Sri Lanka is growth enhancing (Bandara & Tisdell, 2003;Fernando, Bandara, & Smith, 2013).…”