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The Peril of going to the IMF: Is there an alternative?-by Chandre Dharmawardana Source:Island The forex crisis had forced the government to jettison its initial set of economic managers of the Central bank who looked for home-grown solutions and opposed dealing with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The President re-instated a set of managers whose ideas were more orthodox and aligned with the neo-liberal bankers of the West. This “about turn” by Gotabaya Rajapaksa fitted perfectly with the views of his successor Mr. Wickremasinghe. JRJ’s “import and sell” consumer economy Gavin Karunaratne, a retired civil servant of the 1950-1970s era, has published a new booklet entitled “How the IMF’s structural adjustments destroyed Sri Lanka” (Godage Publishers) where he claims that today’s ills are a direct consequence of JR Jayawardena’s IMF-inspired policies. JRJ converted Sri Lanka’s “produce locally to consume and sell” economy of the Sirimavo era, to a post-1977 “import ...