Sri Lanka expects 8.5 percent growth in 2011: central bank
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
, Posted by lanka matha at 11:22 PM
Sri Lanka's Central Bank on Tuesday forecast the island's post-war recovery would accelerate this year with 8.5 percent economic growth on the back of a blistering expansion in tourism.
The country's economy grew 8.0 percent in 2010, up from 3.5 percent a year earlier when security forces were in the final stages of crushing Tamil Tiger rebels and ending decades of ethnic bloodshed.
"We expect growth to accelerate to 9 percent in 2012 and 9.5 percent in 2013," Central Bank governor Nivard Cabraal said in a statement outlining the bank's monetary policy for 2011.
Cabraal said business confidence and receipts from tourism had boomed since the end of the war in May 2009, while foreign investment and export earnings had also picked up.
Tourist visitors to Sri Lanka topped 600,000 in 2010, a near 50 percent jump on the previous year.
The island's foreign reserves hit a record high of 6.6 billion dollars by the end of 2010, helping the country to notch a 900 million dollar balance of payment surplus, Cabraal said.
Sri Lanka's foreign reserves slipped to less than a billion dollars during the final months of the conflict, forcing the government to secure a 2.6 billion-dollar bailout package from the IMF in July 2009.
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