In April 2023, Kazuo Ueda became the 32nd governor of the Bank of Japan (BoJ), which had become famous for adopting an ultra-dovish monetary policy. Japan had maintained a zero-interest-rate policy for years in order to achieve growth and take the economy out of deflation. Ueda had to decide whether to raise interest rates after achieving the bank’s inflation target of 2 per cent. This was a crucial decision as the United States and other countries had raised interest rates because of higher inflation levels caused by supply-side disruptions arising from the Russo-Ukrainian War. Japan’s continued low interest rates were causing capital to flow out of the country in search of better returns, generating a further depreciation of the yen and gravely impacting the import costs of basic necessities like food and fuel. Historically, any indication of an interest rate hike in Japan had impacted expectations and sentiment so profoundly that it had led to a freefall in the consumer price index, leading to deflation and eliminating growth prospects. However, with Japan experiencing positive growth rates, inflation above the targeted rate, and a much-anticipated wage hike, it was time to rethink the country’s interest-rate policy.
In May 2022, Sri Lanka faced its worst economic crisis since its 1948 independence from Britain. The crisis led to skyrocketing prices, double-digit inflation, a more than 100 per cent increase in fuel prices, multi-hour power cuts, depleting foreign exchange reserves, an acute shortage of food and medicines, a dramatic collapse in incomes, mounting government deficits, devastating government policies, record debt defaults, and a downgraded currency rating. This was a dramatic shift, since Sri Lanka had once been the fastest-growing nation in the South Asian region with the second-highest per capita income in terms of purchasing power parity. It had the highest Human Capital Index among countries in South Asia. After the end of the civil war in 2009, Sri Lanka had accessed borrowings from the international market for infrastructure investments and earned the reputation of being a disciplined borrower that had never defaulted. By 2019, the World Bank had classified Sri Lanka as an upper-income country. The country’s economic crisis of 2022 resulted from politically motivated inefficiencies in government finances caused by unproductive spending. An unsustainable current account deficit, along with a large fiscal deficit, led to high and unsustainable government debt. Two black swan events—the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the 2022 intensification of the Russo-Ukrainian War—sparked the crisis. Though the International Monetary Fund (IMF), G7 countries, and India and China facilitated Sri Lanka’s bailout and prevented the country from defaulting on its loan repayments, an action plan to bring about structural changes was the only real remedy that could bring the country out of crisis and allow it to sustain itself over the longer term. This case highlights the factors that led to the crisis and the dilemmas faced by Sri Lanka’s new prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, as he worked to draw up a restructuring plan and bring Sri Lanka’s economy back from crisis.