Faculty of Arts
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- ItemRight to Equality(University of Peradeniya, 2003) Udagama, Deepika
- ItemIs food price inflation transitory? empirical evidence from Sri Lanka(2015) Selliah Sivarajasingham, Shri-Dewi ApplanaiduFood prices are excluded from core measures of inflation in many countries assuming food prices are transitory. Exclusion of food prices may lead to information loss, leading to higher inflationary expectations, a downward bias to forecasts of future inflation and lags in policy responses. Assumption that log food price series behave by way of I(1) and differenced log food price series linger in the manner of I(0) process leads to model misspecification. Correct identification of the memory in the food price series is vital for the correct model specification and is important for policy makers. This study aims to examine whether food price inflation is transitory in Sri Lanka by estimating the memory properties of food price series using non-parametric, semi-parametric and parametric tests. The study covers the period from January, 2003 to December, 2013. Results show that food price inflation, nonfood price inflation and headline inflation, and global food price inflation series are fractionally integrated. Food price series in Sri Lanka commoves with global food prices. Research findings show that food price inflation is not transitory, long memory series. The outcomes of this attempt have consequential implications towards food policy, trade policy and monetary policy makers. These findings suggest that neglecting food prices may render the core inflation measure a biased measure of long run inflation.
- ItemAn eager embrace: emergency rule and authoritarianism in republican Sri Lanka(Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2015) Udagama, DeepikaMuch of Sri Lanka’s post-independence period has seen governance under states of emergency. The invocation of the Public Security Ordinance (PSO)1 by successive governments was a common feature of political life and, indeed, an integral aspect of the political culture of the republic. Several generations of Sri Lankans have grown up and have been socialised into political and public life in an environment fashioned by states of exception replete with attendant symbols and imagery. Images of police with automatic weapons, military check-points, barbed wire, lengthy periods of detention (often administrative detention) mainly of the political ‘other’, the trauma of political violence and the ever- present sense of fear became the ‘normal’. The state of exception has become the norm in Sri Lanka from the 1970s onwards. The permanency of the state of exception was further consolidated when the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act, No. 48 of 1979 (PTA) was converted into a permanent law in 1982.2 Although not an emergency regulation, the PTA conferred extraordinary powers on the executive branch (e.g. powers of arrest and detention) to deal with what it recognised as acts of terrorism. That in combination with the ever-present emergency powers, which were sanctioned by the Constitution, provided a formidable legal framework to entrench the state of exception. The omnipotence of the executive presidency created by the second republican constitution (1978) amplified the potency of those exceptional powers. Sri Lanka had become the quintessential ‘National Security State’, the vestiges of which have not been shaken off even five
- ItemThe democratic state and religous pluralism(University of Peradeniya, 2012) Udagama, Deepika
- ItemThe fragmented republic(University of Peradeniya, 2013) Udagama, Nelum Deepika