Sri Lankan tea pickers’ dreams shattered as nation faces economic crisis

 The Covid-19 pandemic severed the tourism lifeline of the Indian Ocean nation, already short of revenue in the wake of steep tax cuts by the government.

On a lush plantation in Sri Lanka, Arulappan Ideijody deftly plucks the tips of each tea bush, throwing them over her shoulder into an open basket on her back. After a month of picking more than 18 kg (40 lb) of such tea leaves each day, she and her husband, fellow picker Michael Colin, 48, receive about 30,000 rupees, worth about $80 after the island nation devalued its currency.

“It is not close to enough money,” Arulappan, 42, said of their earnings, which must support the couple’s three children and her elderly mother-in-law. “Where we used to eat two vegetables, now we can only afford one.” She is one of millions of Sri Lankans reeling from the island’s worst Sri lanka economic crisis in decades.

The Covid-19 pandemic severed the tourism lifeline of the Indian Ocean nation, already short of revenue in the wake of steep tax cuts by the government. Left critically short of foreign currency to buy essential supplies of food, fuel and medicines, Sri Lanka has turned to the International Monetary Fund for an emergency bailout.

Malaysian PM Mahathir accepts failure of the boom he launched 30 years ago

While Vision 2020 was always more rhetoric than reality, it did serve to harness Malaysia to the climate of the times

Mahathir Mohamad has walked away from one of the big intellectual drivers of his decades at Malaysia’s helm: The idea that the former commodity-dependent backwater could be transformed into a fully developed country by 2020. It’s vital for the Southeast Asian nation’s future that the right lessons be learned from this letdown.

The prime minister conceded last weekend that Vision 2020, his demanding scheme to propel Malaysia to an industrial powerhouse, has failed. Launched in 1991, the plan became shorthand for the rapid development that characterized much of Asia during that decade. Mahathir Mohamad effectively just closed the book on an economic era. For this, he is to be applauded, overdue though such an acknowledgment was.

While Vision 2020 was always more rhetoric than reality, it did serve to harness Malaysia to the climate of the times. Globalization was in its glory days, elaborate supply chains were built throughout the region, and foreign investment poured in. Living standards and education attainment rose, Japan was Asia’s big commercial power and the end of the Cold War made Western-style economic and political opening seem like natural law. I even believed it myself during my tenure in Kuala Lumpur before witnessing the devastation wrought by the Asian financial crisis. Not that Mahathir saw the West as necessarily the best template. He often favored Japan and its model of post-war industrialization, which inspired a signature approach that he dubbed, “Look East.”

Old wine, new bottle: $7-bn exporter refund old plan with Rs 9,000 cr added

The new program will subsume existing export incentives, for which the government had already penciled in a revenue hit of Rs 41,000 crore in July

India’s new measures announced on Saturday to revive a flagging economy through an aid to exporters isn’t as big a boost as the initial numbers suggested. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said a new tax refund program for exporters from January 1 will cost the government Rs 50,000 crore ($7 billion) in revenue annually. But it may only amount to an additional Rs 9,000 crore a year in benefits to exporters, a review of budget numbers show.

That’s because the new program will subsume existing export incentives, for which the government had already penciled in a revenue hit of Rs 41,000 crore in July. The overall size of the new scheme will be more or less similar to the existing incentives, which at present is around Rs 40,000-45,000 crore, said Alok Chaturvedi, the director general of foreign trade.

India will separately set up a Rs 10,000 crore funding window for affordable housing to revive stalled projects, Nirmala Sitharaman told reporters in New Delhi on Saturday while unveiling what was her ministry’s third set of measures in four weeks to boost growth.

“It’s better for exports than housing, but not a game changer,” said Teresa John, an economist with Nirmal Bang Equities Pvt. in Mumbai. “There were no significant measures to boost housing demand, and disappointed expectation, and hence may negatively impact real estate stocks.”