Consumer credit card ownership and usage practices: empirical evidence from Sri Lanka

Knowledge that has been accumulated through research efforts concerning credit card ownership and usage behaviour has been confined to Western societies. Given the importance of cross‐national application of consumer marketing concepts and propositions for academic and practical reasons, investigations are needed to test whether consumer credit card usage patterns that are assumed to exist in the West also exist in non‐Western parts of the world, especially in Asia. Therefore, objectives of this research were to explore credit card ownership and usage practices in Sri Lanka, and to explore the relationship between credit card ownership and usage practices, and demographic and socio‐economic characteristics of credit card users. The findings offer implications for researchers and practitioners.     

Peasants and plantations in the Sri Lankan tea sector: causes of the change in their relative viability*

In contrast to the increasing trend in farm size found in most agricultural sectors, the absolute number of producers and relative share of total production from small farms growing green leaf tea in Sri Lanka have increased significantly over time. The boom in peasant production and the corresponding decline in plantations are due to the same general drivers explaining the increase in farm size elsewhere. Government programs and price effects that reduced revenue uncertainty and relative costs of production have enhanced the competitive position of small farmers relative to large estates.     

Decision-making in soil conservation: application of a behavioral model to potato farmers in Sri Lanka

Soil erosion is one of the most devastating problems in the upper watershed areas in Sri Lanka. Erosion-prone cultivation of vegetables (especially potatoes) on steep slopes, without soil conservation measures, has become a major problem in the recent past. Soil erosion has significant impacts on on-farm as well as off-farm activities. Although various institutions have launched programs to introduce soil conservation techniques, these have not yielded expected results mainly due to a lack of understanding of the potato farmers’ behavior on investment decisions on soil conservation. Hence the conceptual model on investment decisions on soil conservation was tested in this paper. The analytical results of the generalized least square model indicated the importance of personal and economic, as well as institutional, factors in decision-making in soil conservation. Therefore, obtaining farmer adoption of erosion-control practices will require the use of various implementation tools such as education, subsidies, and technical assistance. Low willingness to invest in soil conservation indicated the necessity for public installation of conservation structures if they are to be widely used in potato farmlands in the upper watersheds in Sri Lanka.     

Explaining changes in Sri Lanka’s wage distribution, 1992-2014: a quantile regression analysis

Sri Lanka experienced robust economic growth during the period 1992–2014 and had a decline in inequality due to wages rising fastest among low earners. The decline in inequality came almost entirely from rising rewards to low-skill labor, consistent with Sri Lanka’s comparative advantage in the global economy. However, educational and occupational upgrading served to widen wage gaps between the highest earners and the rest of the workforce. Using quantile regression analysis, this study also finds that selection bias overestimates average wages and underestimates the level of inequality, while exaggerating the extent to which women’s wages grew. It concludes with a discussion of the negative implications of persistent inequities across education, occupation, and gender, and recommends policies to address them.     

Spatial clustering of rural poverty and food insecurity in Sri Lanka

We mapped poverty, with reference to a nutrition-based poverty line, to analyse its spatial clustering in Sri Lanka. We used the Divisional Secretariat poverty map, derived by combining the principal component analysis and the synthetic small area estimation technique, as the data source. Two statistically significant clusters appear. One cluster indicates that low poverty rural areas cluster around a few low poverty urban areas, where low agricultural employment and better access to roads are key characteristics. The other indicates a cluster of high poverty rural areas, where agriculture is the dominant economic activity, and where spatial clustering is associated with factors influencing agricultural production. Agricultural smallholdings are positively associated with spatial clustering of poor rural areas. In areas where water availability is low, better access to irrigation significantly reduces poverty. Finally, we discuss the use of poverty mapping for effective policy formulation and interventions for alleviating poverty and food insecurity.     

Sources of Competitive Advantage and Firm Performance: The Case of Sri Lankan Value-Added Tea Producers

Given the greater importance of firm-effects as opposed to industry-effects in explaining firm performance, this study incorporated the resource and strategy-based views of the competitive advantage paradigm in explaining the performance of value-added tea producers in Sri Lanka. The study revealed the existence of three significantly different strategic groups and justified the assertion that there is significant intra-industry heterogeneity. Only one strategic group, which comprised four dominant firms, revealed strong mobility barriers and higher performance differences. However, no performance differences were evident between the other two strategic groups.     

Determinants of youth not in education,employment or training: Evidence from Sri Lanka

The presence of a large proportion of youth neither in education, employment, or training (NEET) signals problems in a country’s education and labor market systems, and has wide‐ranging negative consequences, extending beyond the individual to the economy and society. Using Sri Lankan Labour Force Survey data for the year 2016 and binomial and multinomial logistic regression models, in this paper we provide the first estimates of NEET‐related risk factors in Sri Lanka. Key risk factors of becoming NEET include being female, being of ethnic and religious minorities, belonging to the older 20 to 24 age group, having very low or very high levels of education, being illiterate in English, belonging to a low‐income household or one headed by a male, having young children, and living in more remote areas. Our findings hold several important policy implications for reducing the NEET rate in Sri Lanka and engaging more youth in education and in the labor force.     

The scarring effects of youth joblessness in Sri Lanka

Retrospective data on labor market spells for successive cohorts of youth in the school‐to‐work transition in Sri Lanka are used to examine whether early spells of joblessness lead to subsequent difficulty in finding or keeping a job. A balancing score approach is used to generate pairs of youth in the school‐to‐work transition who have similar expected levels of joblessness but who differ in realized levels of joblessness. Assuming that youth are not able to perfectly control whether they are employed or not employed, we argue that marginal differences in joblessness among otherwise observationally equivalent youth can be viewed similarly to a regression discontinuity in experienced joblessness. We find evidence of scarring in that spending the first year after leaving school without a job or training increases subsequent share of time spent jobless by 23–31 percentage points and lowers subsequent wages by 5.5%–7.5%.     

Sri Lankan households a decade after the Indian Ocean tsunami

This study estimates the causal effect of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on household consumption and income in Sri Lanka 8 years after the event, using a difference‐in‐differences methodology and extensive household survey data. The analysis finds a strong association between the area‐wide tsunami disaster shock and increases in household income and consumption in the long term. The increase in consumption is much smaller than the observed increase in income; while the increase in income is mostly observed in nonagricultural wage income (and a decline in agricultural income). We also find that households in high‐income regions and lower‐damage districts experienced a much better recovery, in terms of income, than those in poorer regions or those districts that experienced more destruction. Deviating from the common observation on short‐term adverse impacts of catastrophic disasters in low‐ and middle‐income countries, these results are suggestive of a potential for long‐lasting and more successful recovery scenarios. Still, Sri Lanka received a very large amount of external assistance post‐tsunami—an amount that may not be replicable elsewhere. It is likely that this massive inflow of assistance, further helped by the end of the armed conflict in 2009, has contributed significantly to this relatively successful recovery.