Sri Lankan Trade In 2012 (Infographic)
Sri Lankan Trade In 2012 (so far) by Abdul Halik Azeez.
Halik’s been on a good blogging run lately, check him out for good street and high-level ecoenomics. On the latter, this is his infographic on the state of Sri Lankan trade in 2012, so far. Basically we import a lot more than we export, which isn’t exactly new. It’s just that this year the balance of trade is worse than the last.
What’s interesting here, and you should read the whole post is that you can see what exactly we’re importing and what we export. We take in a lot of oil and machinery and output tea and apparel, mostly. This graph doesn’t seem to include services, which is a big part of the economy, but I guess those are the physical ins and outs.
We’re obviously spending too much on petrol, largely because our electricity depends on thermal power plants (AKA generators) when it doesn’t rain (and the hydro goes out). There are a few power plant investments that should come online soon, but as the last one (Noorochcholai) keeps breaking, this isn’t insanely promising. In terms of exports, the apparel industry emerged in the last 30 years, so we could presumably find another source of real revenue with decent policy and effort. As it is, however, 2012 has been worse than 2011, at least in terms of keeping a balance.
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Thanks for the link love! Yup this only has physical goods, being the trade account. Services are captured in the Current Account. Mostly comprising of tourism and remittances, pretty huge. But again in the red.