Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake has been selected as the Finance Minister of the Year for Asia-Pacific by the The Banker magazine for his efforts to steer Sri Lanka into a new era of economic reform and a change of mindset, a Ministry release said.
The Banker, an international financial publication, published in London, inter alia selects as the finance minister of the year, a finance minister who has best managed to stimulate growth and stabilize the economy of his country.
For 2016, Sri Lanka’s Minister of Finance Ravi Karunanayake was selected as the Finance minister of the Year. The Banker says Karunanayake secured a $ 1.5 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan program that the country needed to avoid a balance of payments crisis, replenish reserves and rebuild confidence among international investors.
Sri Lanka’s latest bond issues in the international capital markets suggests Karunanayake has indeed reached his objective. In 2015, the sovereign issued a $ 1.5 billion dual-tranche note - its largest since 2007. A year later, it printed a second bond of the same size, with order books of $ 6.6 billion, despite market volatility after the UK voted to leave the EU.
Sri Lanka is also working towards fiscal consolidation. Sri Lanka’s budget deficit has dropped from 7% when Karunanayake took office in January 2015 to 5.4% in 2016 – below the targeted of 5.6%.
After a visit in September 2016, the IMF said Sri Lanka’s tightening of fiscal and monetary policies has been effective and that it met the IMF program’s targets through to the end of June 2016.