Pursuing Sri Lanka’s need for a Smarter Trade Strategy

The Sri Lanka Economic Summit 2017’ was held recently to dig deeper into the Sri Lanka’s latest trade reform agenda anchored towards new preferential trade pacts, tariff liberalisation and export promotion, with the participation of an expert line up of speakers, representing both local and international trade bodies.

The experts took their seats at a thematic session titled ‘’Executing a Smarter Trade Strategy Amidst Turbulence’, and shared their views and also recommendations on Sri Lanka’s Trade Strategy and the direction it should take.

The session discussed whether the anti-globalisation rhetoric is a real threat, what is the smarter way for Sri Lanka to plan out its forward march towards liberalisation and trade integration and how can Sri Lanka latch on to the growth in Asia, using ASEAN as a pivot.

‘Sri Lanka Economic Summit 2017,’ was organised by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce and took place on 25 and 26 July, 2017 at the Cinnamon Grand Hotel, Colombo.

The event was heartily supported by some of the best blue chip entities in the country.

Accordingly, Sunshine Holdings PLC comes was the Platinum Sponsor, Standard Chartered Bank enterer the fray as the Gold Sponsor, Fonterra Brands was the Silver Sponsor and Dialog Axiata was the Telecomm unications Partner of the event.

Janashakthi Insurance, Prima Group, and Nestle Lanka joined in as the strategic partners.

Echo Wave came in as the Digital Events Platform Partner and OMD of OmniCom MediaGroup was the communications partner.

In general smarter trading refers to the survival in today’s volatile ever-changing global economy.

As a direct result of economic globalization and computerized trading, today's professional stock, bond, and futures traders face a career-making - or breaking - challenge: to track and immediately comprehend the bewildering place of market, volume, and price changes, then somehow profit from this unexpected volatility.

In this global context, Sri Lanka is on a learning curve and the sooner we learn about the beans of current global trends, the chances of survival and sustainability becomes higher.

Therefore, this was a much needed forum to drive the minds entrusted with the handling of the island’s economy and under guidance of the Ranil-Maithri forward driven unity governance, we need to gather all the expertise of global economic masterminds for the country to succeed.

Gone are the days, when countries could stand alone and march forward in their locally designed self-sustaining economic models, so by tagging along with the pack who leads the global economy, we can stay afloat and prosper with the minimum of international donor contributions to keep the country’s economy alive and breathing.