Let me first congratulate all the friends, the TOP 25 firms that have received the award. Some of you have gone up, some of you have come down a notch or two. That is part of the game, like the minister of Finance, myself, Minister of Tourism, must have also noticed, that we have gone up a notch or two this year. Best of all is my colleague, Sarath Fonseka who in is own profession, has gone beyond the five stars, and become a field marshal. First, we must apologize for being late.  I had one condition, I told Mathi if I come, I won’t be able to spend too much of time, because at the moment we are busy, trying to answer your question, “What have you been doing after you were elected?” Well, we had an election in between, but we are confident that we will have our political agenda in place and that we will be able to initiate all the major political programmes, by November 21, the day President Maithripala Sirisena announced that he is going to be a common candidate and the UNP working committee backed the decision, some will take a bit of time to be concluded.

That Political Agenda of which the 19th Amendment and getting the UN resolution passed at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, two of the most important ones have still more work to be done including constitutional amendments, new constitution and as the President announced today he is calling for the abolishment of the Executive Presidency. I will not say here what we are going to do. President Maithripala Sirisena will announce, so that we would have finished the major items on our political agenda.

Which leaves the next part, which is the Economic and Development Agenda. Today, as some of the speakers mentioned here where the top corporates are those who can have a critical eye on their own performance and the performance of the others. Now my job here and of the President and of the cabinet is to have a critical eye on Sri Lanka’s performance so far. It is not too reassuring. Because we have found that our revenue has fallen to 10.7 percent of the GDP. Our ratio of export earnings to the GDP has come down.  Our ratio of debt has gone up.  What is worrying are the international developments. If you look at your export earnings, manufactured earnings they have all come down. It is only the foreign employment remittances that have increased.

Now what has happened as of yesterday? The Middle East is going to be a battleground. Let’s hope there is no major incident, which could result in numbers of people having to return to Sri Lanka. Let us keep our fingers crossed and hope those incidents are avoided.

The Middle East is also the global centre for fuel production, both oil and natural gas. We are also affected by one of our major export earners – tea, which has lost its major markets both in the Middle East as well as in Eastern Europe. Also alarming is the fact that we are losing our competitiveness. Today’s economy is not what we faced in 1977, 2001, 2005 or 2010. Globalisation has taken place and this in turn has been affected by the financial crisis of 2008.

But within it you will find top performance. One of which will be Vietnam. If the Transpacific Partner-ship comes in to place and that depends a lot on what the US Congress will do next year or the year after, you will find that Vietnam will get a reputation for being one the most competitive economies in Asia, even rivaling that of China.

Even without the Transpacific Partnership, Vietnam has become competitive, becoming the centre for manufacturing. So we have lost our competitiveness vis a vis some of our other Asian friendly countries.

On the other hand, as I mentioned earlier, there is a low wage base emerging in the Bay of Bengal with Bangladesh and Myanmar. Myanmar will take some time to settle down after the election, nevertheless those two will become the low wage manufacturing bases. So where do we fit ourselves in? From being an export economy sending out manufactured goods today we have to become part of the global value chain. Now this is what we have to be prepared for. While I have painted a gloomy picture it does not mean we have to go down. Within it there are nations that can come up and make themselves strong. This is where Sri Lanka has to fit itself. And there are decisions we have to take in the coming few months, in the course of the next year.

Firstly, how do we join the global value chain? How do we remove the numerous one stops and ensure that we come up in the ease of doing business? And finally we have to stop substituting tax exemptions and tax holidays for competitiveness. To face competitiveness let us see what we can do to increase our performance. We have to move out of being a low wage economy, to become a middle-income economy and also a high wage economy.

We have to enter our own Free Trade Agreements. At the moment the government is discussing with the EU, the removal of the EU ban on fisheries. We have made significant progress, which will enable us now to start discussing in the early part of next year, the ability to regain GSP plus. We have to think of an economic and technological agreement with India, China and Singapore and start negotiating for a Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Competitiveness is essential and to become competitive the tasks undertaken are not merely in manufacturing, not merely in services, but also include upgrading the skills of those who go for foreign employment and turning around the rural economy. 

We have a fair number of ministers who are attending to this task beginning with the Minister of Finance, the Minister for Development Strategy and International Trade and the Minister for Tourism, – which is one of the sec-tors that will give short-term gains and medium-term gains. We have a Minister of Primary Industries, which is to ensure that the rural economy becomes export oriented and competitive. We cannot do it overnight. Some segments have to become competitive. Then the Ministry of Plantation Industries, Agriculture, Fisheries, the Rural Economic Affairs; they are all involved in making the economy perform better backed by the Minister for Megapolis and Western Development; he has an ambitious plan of converting the Western Province into a highly urbanized area. The Minister of Southern Development has to handle both the issues of Hambantota Development and the rest of the South. And the Minister for Wayamba Development; the major road to Kandy and Dambulla will go through Wayamba.  On the other hand there will be eco-nomic zones coming all the way down to Divulapitiya. This is the task that they have to perform, not looking at the fact that we are planning out Trincomalee and the Kandy City.

On the other hand the key to competitiveness is the education system. A recent World Bank Survey on Sri Lanka’s education system, released last week if I am not mistaken, has pointed out the fact that there has been a drop in the quality of education. The numbers going through vocational, technical, and university education are still small. There is a big mismatch between the job market and the post-secondary education sector to the extent that our short-term bottlenecks for development are skills and vocational training. We have to focus short term on creating the skills and creating vocationally trained people, while in the medium term we have to improve the quality of our education; primary, secondary and post-secondary. These are the major challenges that we are focusing on, now that we have decided on the political agenda. The next years will see us bringing out the policies and mobilizing your support to go ahead.

While Sri Lanka’s business sector and the corporates have become more competitive, all our resources are in-sufficient for a rapid economic development. If we are to look at Sri Lanka as becoming a platform, as I have mentioned many times before, for competitive value addition and to become a logistic centre we do require foreign investment. And it is available. We have to ensure that we have our next generation economic reforms and that we can attract investment to Sri Lanka. It is certainly going to be a challenge, which we cannot run away from.

As I mentioned earlier this is not the best global situation where the global economy is concerned, to embark on economic reforms, but nevertheless there are many bright spots and let us make Sri Lanka one of those bright spots.

So I thought I would mention to you in short, what we are planning to do, and what we are thinking of, and what we have done. It’s not so much talking about what we are doing, but doing what has to be done and talk about it later. So I hope we have the support of all of you as we venture out to face this new challenge.

Again, congratulations to the winners, and thank you for having invited me.