Lanka must open doors to skilled professionals – expert
Sri Lanka which lacks knowhow needs to find it from its immigrants willing to make the island their home and not set obstacles in their path to their arrival, observed a reputed globally-renowned economist.
Prof. Ricardo Hausmann and Murtaza Jafferjee, CEO, JB Securities (right-moderator).
Economist and consultant to the government on improving the Board of Investment (BOI), Prof. Ricardo Haussmann said that the immigration policy is the “lowest hanging fruit” which must expand to encourage more foreign knowhow.
Prof. Hausmann is a Director of the Harvard University’s Centre for Development and Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the Kennedy School of Government. He was delivering the speech on “Accessing know-how for development” at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute Auditorium on Wednesday organized by Advocata and Echelon Business Magazine.
Spelling out a few examples, he noted that time and again it has been found that most people would have been trained in other countries and obtained their knowhow before working in the jobs that provided them with this training.
These people would later vie for opportunities to establish businesses in the same sector thereby giving rise to a sharing of the knowhow learnt from other places, he said.
He noted that if Sri Lanka was to become a destination that would allow the big guys to move in then there would be much more dynamics.
Prof. Haussmann observed that working for the past three years he had found that things would take longer than expected to happen since the processes involved were more complicated.
“It’s hard to do things in this bureaucratic sector. Public sector bureaucrats have to be empowered more,” he explained.
Moreover, he pointed out that the global obsession with curbing corruption was “paralysing people all over the world.”
Today the people were involved in the business of following existing procedures and not solving the problems, he said adding that this was not just the problem faced by the Sri Lankan bureaucracy but it was a “universal problem.”
Audience.
Prof. Haussmann has been working with the BOI on establishing industrial zones in the country and has also found that infrastructure development in terms of road construction needs to get underway in a bid to cut on travel time.
Asked whether there would be opportunities for computer scientists or IT professionals from other countries to be attracted to Sri Lanka going by the wage structure in Colombo, he queried whether there would not be any firms ready to pay such fees to these experts to work in the country.
In fact, he pointed out that it was not just about bringing down IT professionals to the country but about removing the obstacles in welcoming such experts to Sri Lanka due to legislation.