Reflecting on Middle Income Country status and post-war context
If we leave some of the rhetorical utterances such as the Small Wonder of Asia, aside, there are two frequently used descriptors of the Sri Lankan context. One, that Sri Lanka is a Middle Income Country, and two, that Sri Lanka is a post-conflict country. I would like to examine these descriptions in slightly more depth. Let’s take the Middle Income Country idea. It has significant impact in terms of Sri Lanka’s relations with the international donor community, and we have ostensibly lost some of our bilateral development partners and international NGO presence because of that. But being a Middle Income Country merely means we fall into a particular GNI per capita category , and most of us should realize by now that this is not a good enough measure to judge peoples’ well being. It is insufficient on a number of counts. It does not take into account intra-country inequalities nor does it take into account the ...