Ethnic politics and Third World development: Some lessons from Sri Lanka’s experience

Sri Lanka has been in the forefront among LDCs, always implementing development strategies that are fashionable for a given period of time. Beginning with a capitalist structure in the 1950s, it embraced features of a planned economy in the 1960s. By the mid-1970s it had taken up market-orientated growth policies. Yet its record of achievement is a disappointing one. The primary reasons for this are to be found in the ethnic politics Sri Lanka has been engaged in ever since the end of colonial rule. The political economy of ethnicity is traced through four stages where the common element has been a lack of compatibility between economic policies and political strategy.