Research Director of the Gamani Corea Foundation (GCF), Prof. Tilak Abeysinghe will deliver a lecture on ‘Singapore’s Development Experience: Lessons for Sri Lanka’ as part of the Gamani Corea Foundation lecture series, at the BMICH Orchid Room on May 8 at 5 p.m.
He obtained his PhD in Economics/Econometrics from the University of Manitoba, Canada. His research interests are based on a range of theoretical and applied topics which include the Singapore economy, housing affordability, social epidemiology and quantitative health research.
He has published in highly reputed international journals in the field. He coordinated the keenly awaited monthly newspaper column in The Straits Times, ‘Ask NUS economists’.
Before joining the GCF in July last year, Prof Tilak Abeysinghe, was a professor of economics at the National University of Singapore. He was also a visiting professor at the Kyoto University and the Peradeniya University.
He was the Director of the Singapore Centre for Applied and Policy Economics and an Executive Committee member of the Department of Economics. He continues his affiliation with the NUS.At the time of independence in 1965, the economic and political challenges Singapore faced were by no means less severe than the challenges that the other developing economies faced.
To make the matters worse, with Malaysian hinterland no longer available, Singapore had to face the challenges with hardly any natural resources to depend on except for a relatively minuscule land area of about 580 square km and a population size of about 1.9 million people and perhaps its favourable geographical location.
But Singapore made it; the economy took off just within 10 years from 1965 to 1975 and has been moving steadily to higher and higher altitudes since then. What is there to learn from the Singapore story? In a nutshell, as pointed out by Singapore’s economic architect, Dr Goh Keng Swee, non-economic factors matter more than the economic factors for a successful take-off of a developing economy. The focus of the lecture is to examine these factors.