Priyanga Dunusinghe | University of Colombo (original) (raw)

Papers by Priyanga Dunusinghe

INDIAN JOURNAL OF APPLIED ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS, 2022

The apparel sector plays a vital role in the Sri Lankan economy as the largest net foreign exchan... more The apparel sector plays a vital role in the Sri Lankan economy as the largest net foreign exchange earner, and employment generator. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry's production and exporting activities came under severe stress due to supply and demand shocks. This research aims at assessing the impact of COVID-19 on apparel exports by employing a standard Gravity equation framework on data related to 20 major destinations of Sri Lanka's apparel exports. Data was extracted from a number of national and international data sources such as the Department of Census and Statistics of Sri Lanka and World Integrated Trade Solution. The findings indicated the triple effects of COVID-19 pandemic on apparel exports. First, the overall impact of the pandemic on the apparel industry was substantial. Second, the severity of the pandemic in the destination country had a significantly negative impact on apparel exports. However, the severity of the pandemic in Sri Lanka had no impact indicating the industry was resilient to the pandemic. In other words, the demand-side impact was greater than the supply side impact. Finally, in terms of apparel product categories women apparel exports declined drastically compared to other apparel and textile exports. With respect to other standard variables in the gravity model, partner country market size and level of development, movement in real exchange rate, economic performance of the exporting country and trade openness influence significant to apparel exports in Sri Lanka, was taken into account.

Statistical journal of the IAOS, Oct 21, 2022

University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Nugegoda, Dec 1, 2016

Journal of Finance and Accounting, 2015

This paper examines the relationship between macroeconomic and firm-specific determinants of stoc... more This paper examines the relationship between macroeconomic and firm-specific determinants of stock returns of Sri Lanka and United Kingdom (UK). Our results are based on the fixed effects regression models since those perform statistically better than the random effects and pooled OLS models for Sri Lankan data and the fitted one-way fixed effects firm factor regression indicates that Return on Assets (ROA) and sales growth rate play a significant role in explaining variation in stock returns in Sri Lankan companies while one-way random effect firm factor model in UK shows that E/P ratio, B/M ratio, fixed assets growth rate, size and ROA are the most dominants priced factors in London Stock Exchange (LSE). The explanatory power of regressions increases considerably when we incorporate macroeconomic indicators controlling for firm effects and results show that inflation, GDP and exchange rate remain leading predictors of stock returns variation in both Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) and LSE whereas unemployment and Foreign Portfolio Investments (FPI) become statistically significant only in CSE. Thus, it is noted that stock prices of Sri Lankan and UK companies are sensitive to both company and macroeconomic fundamental changes hence, the stock market analysts and investors find that they can make fundamental base trading strategies as publicly available information play a key role in predicting future returns bringing the conclusions of the Sri Lankan stock market is in semi-strong form efficient in doubt.

University of Colombo Review

International Journal of Foreign Trade and International Business, 2021

In recent years, an influential section of researchers coined Sri Lanka being caught up in a debt... more In recent years, an influential section of researchers coined Sri Lanka being caught up in a debt trap. A number of studies attempted in countering above proposition. Nevertheless, there remained some related aspects which need further investigation into Sri Lanka's external debt position. This study aims at contributing to this ongoing debate by addressing some unanswered areas of research. By employing descriptive and regression analyses, this study analyze the changes into external debt composition, debt ownership, and structural breaks in external debt accumulation during 1978-2019. Data for the study were extracted from few secondary sources published by the national statistical agencies. There are some interesting findings. First, this study found that a sizable share of external debt, at present, consists of commercial borrowing. This is a market deviation which has taken place since 2007. Moreover, external debt ownership has shifted to new sources such as international financial markets and new lenders such as China. The commercial borrowings emanated from new sources have been expensive to the economy. Second, reflecting those changes, our structural break test confirmed that Sri Lanka's external debt growth path witnessed a structural break in year 2007. It implies that external debt obligation grew at a faster rate in post-2007 than that took place during 1978-2006. Graduating from low income economy to a middle income economy and lukewarm approaches adopted by traditional lenders, particularly during the wartime , forced Sri Lanka to seek funds from less restrictive new sources thought such sources were costly. Hence, Sri Lanka's debt burden is mainly due to its increased borrowing at higher costs from sources such as international financial markets and China. Policy makers need to arrest the current situation by exploring avenues to cut down borrowings which are relatively expensive and to make sure the productive use of borrowed financial resources.

International Journal of Financial Management and Economics, 2021

Does foreign aid promote private investment? This study aimed at answering the above question by ... more Does foreign aid promote private investment? This study aimed at answering the above question by exploring the Japanese ODA and private investment relationship for the period of 1971-2009. Sectoral distribution of Japanese ODA clearly indicated that over two-third of Japanese ODA channeled into economic and social infrastructures. Moreover, Japan has provided debt relief grants in a number of occasions thereby reducing the pressure on debt repayment requirements. This study employs both descriptive and regression techniques and data were extracted from national statistical agencies as well as from World Development Indicators. Accordingly, the responsiveness of private investment to Japanese ODA is relatively larger compared to that of the overall ODA. One per cent increase in Japanese ODA-to-GDP ratio leads to 1.03 increase in private gross fixed capital formation-to-GDP ratio. In contrast, one per cent increase in overall ODA leads to 0.44 increase in private gross fixed capital formation-to-GDP ratio. It could be postulate that this differential effect is due to two unique features related to Japanese ODA. First, Japanese ODA has largely funded economic and social infrastructures. Those projects may have largely relaxed bottlenecks for private investment in the economy. These quality infrastructures may have increased productivity and profitability of private ventures thereby stimulating private investments. Second, as the evaluation studies widely documented, majority of Japanese funded projects were implemented efficiently and effectively thereby achieving the status of 'satisfactory' and 'very satisfactory' scores. Hence, our results suggest that Japanese ODA contributed to growth and development in Sri Lanka by stimulating private investments.

Cilengua. Centro Internacional de Investigación de la Lengua Española, 2019

GRB Coordinates Network, 2006

International Journal of Agriculture & Environmental Science, Jun 25, 2021

Journal of Transportation Management, 2002

INTRODUCTION According to the World Investment Report 2001 published by the United Nations Confer... more INTRODUCTION According to the World Investment Report 2001 published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, global foreign direct investment rose to a record US$1.3 trillion dollars in 2000. Contributing to this increase was the number of cross border mergers and acquisitions, which were up nearly 50 percent to US$1.1 trillion (UNCTAD, 2001). In addition to the growth in FDI, world merchandise and service exports have continued to post significant gains. World Trade Organization figures indicate that merchandise exports rose to US$5.47 trillion dollars in 1999 while service exports rose to US$1.35 trillion for the same period. Travel services accounted for 440billionofthesedollars(WorldTradeOrganization,2001).Thelatestestimatesfrom,theInternationalAirTransportAssociationarethatthetotaleconomicoutputoftheairtransportindustryisoverUS440 billion of these dollars (World Trade Organization, 2001). The latest estimates from, the International Air Transport Association are that the total economic output of the air transport industry is over US440billionofthesedollars(WorldTradeOrganization,2001).Thelatestestimatesfrom,theInternationalAirTransportAssociationarethatthetotaleconomicoutputoftheairtransportindustryisoverUS1.3 trillion. In the United States alone, the airline industry contributed nearly $273 billion dollar...

In finance, it is assumed that the individual investors are rational, but in reality empirical st... more In finance, it is assumed that the individual investors are rational, but in reality empirical studies show that their judgments and decision making lead towards irrational decision making causing market inefficiency. Thus, this study aims at examining whether some behavioural and contextual factors influence on irrational behavior of individual investors decisions in the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE). The results show that the individual investors in the CSE are influenced by four behavioral biases: Herding, Heuristics, Prospect, Market and the contextual factors in which each dimension includes certain behavioural variables. The multivariate analysis demonstrates that among all the five underlying biases; Heuristics, Prospect, Market and Herding and Contextual, only four factors are found to be influenced on investment performance. The herding, heuristics and contextual factors have to be influenced positively on individual investors’ performance. Although the prospect variables (t...

This study examines the impact of FDI spillovers on productivity of firms in the manufacturing se... more This study examines the impact of FDI spillovers on productivity of firms in the manufacturing sector in Nigeria. While there are numerous studies focusing on the direct impact of FDI in Nigeria, only very few studies have investigated the spillover effects of FDI on productivity. The study uses firm level panel survey data obtained from the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey. The techniques of analysis used are pooled OLS, random effects and generalised method of moments (GMM). Our results show that there is presence of significant FDI spillover effects in the manufacturing sector in Nigeria. We find positive and significant impact of FDI spillovers through the horizontal and forward channels while backward FDI spillover has a negative and significant impact on productivity. While the result of horizontal and forward spillovers can be attributed to the competitiveness of local firms and quality of inputs from foreign owned suppliers respectively, the negative backward spillover may be ...

The study of FDI spillover effects on domestic firms in developing countries has attracted the at... more The study of FDI spillover effects on domestic firms in developing countries has attracted the attention of many researchers over the past few decades. This study examines the role of country of origin of foreign investors in influencing FDI spillovers in the manufacturing sector in Nigeria using survey data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey published in 2018. Our study differs from previous FDI studies in the sense that existing studies in Nigeria did not pay attention to the country of origin of foreign investors in the analysis of FDI spillover effects. We follow the methodology of Javorcik (2004) in constructing the FDI spillover variables and use the augmented Cobb-Douglas production function to estimate the spillover effects of FDI on productivity of local firms where we incorporate investors’ origin. Pooled OLS is used for the estimation of the parameters. The results of the regression analysis show that investors that originated from Europe have positive and statisticall...

The distributional consequences of trade reforms have attracted greater attention in recent decad... more The distributional consequences of trade reforms have attracted greater attention in recent decades due to the fact that most countries experienced an increase in inequality during the post-reforms period. This paper attempts to review some selected studies covering both theory and recent empirical research. There are some emerging evidence that trade reforms have improved wage distribution though the majority of studies concludes that the reforms have worsened wage inequality in many countries. JEL Classification: J3,J6,F16,O15

The aim of this study was to investigate the verbal ability, visual behavior and memory in presch... more The aim of this study was to investigate the verbal ability, visual behavior and memory in preschoolers, in relation to an animated picture book with narration. Furthermore, the purpose was to study the effect of joint attention on visual behavior and memory. Data was collected in a sample of 63 children between 33 and 48-months-old. Children were matched into two different groups. To operationalize joint attention children in the experiment group watched the movie together with the test leader while children in the control group looked at the movie by themselves. Throughout the movie, visual behavior was registered by an eye-tracker. The results showed a positive linear relation between the verbal ability of the children and their memory of the movie. However, there was no linear relationship between visual behavior and memory, and joint attention did not affect the visual behavior or memory. In conclusion, while verbal ability had a clear impact on children’s memory of the movie, ...