Basic needs: The case of Sri Lanka

This article has two related objectives: to judge Sri Lanka's success in meeting its ‘basic needs’ and growth objectives, and to use Sri Lanka's experience to cast light on general hypotheses regarding basic needs. The analysis suggests that Sri Lanka's social expenditures had a substantial cost in growth and unemployment. However, largely because of these social programmes, it has the best social indicators, compared to its income, of any country for which data are available. Its growth has, surprisingly, been above average for low-income countries. Implications for basic-needs programmes include the need to ‘target’ social programmes, the high priority of primary education and the potential high impact, but also high costs, of assuring minimum caloric intakes.