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    SAARC — From Association to Community: a Small Country Economic Perspective
    (1999) Kelegama, Saman
    This essay has given a small country perspective of SAFTA and a more advanced level of economic cooperation in the region. The essay identified four broad areas as major areas of concern for a small member country: (a) political commitment; (b) market access; (c) safeguarding domestic producers; and (c~ trade and investment supporting policies. The concerns in these areas have to be effectively addressed in order to reap the benefits of a PTA or FTA. At present, the domestic policy support for SAFTA remains lukewarm. As long as this is the case, initiatives by the political establishment for regional cooperation will continue to be ambiguous, sporadic, and fragmented, leading to a ’stop and go’ pattern of regional cooperation in SAARC. In such patterns of cooperation, SAARC growth in terms of regional institutional development and programme implementation will remain uncertain, and the organisation’s life cycle will oscillate between short-lived euphoria and agonisingly protracted stalemates.
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    Indo-Sri Lanka Trade and the Bilateral Free Trade Agreement: A Sri Lankan Perspective
    (1999) Kelegama, Saman
    India-Sri Lanka trade has been growing in recent years. In the mid-1990s, India became the main import supplier of Sri Lanka. Although Sri Lankan exports to India remain small, they have been growing faster than Indian imports to Sri Lanka in recent years. The Indo-Sri Lanka Bilateral Free Trade Agreement is a further step, by removing existing trade barriers, to stimulate trade between the two nations. While trade brings benefits to both there is an import competing sector in both countries that is still not in a position to face external competition from free trade. The Agreement allows for a “negative list” to accommodate this sector but preparation of the negative list has proved to be a time-consuming and intricate exercise. Once the Agreement comes into force, the Sri Lankan export sector is faced with a challenge to produce goods that are in demand in the Indian market. The challenge may be a “warm up” exercise to face future free trade under the South Asia Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA).
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    SAFTA: a Critique
    (2004) Kelegama, Saman
    In this paper, an attempt is made to examine the SAPTA agreement that was signed by the Foreign Ministers of the SAARC member countries at the 12th SAARC Summit. First a brief survey is made in Section II on SAPTA. Section III then makes an assessment of the SAFTA agreement in the light of the Group of Eminent Persons (GEP) report recommendations. Section IV has some concluding remarks.
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    SAPTA and Its Future
    (Sage, 1996) Kelegama, Saman
    This paper is structured in a way that first section gives the background to SAPTA. Section 2 examines the impediments to the progress of SAPTA and the validity of the preferential trade assumption to South Asia. Section 3 examines the international experience with preferential trading arrangements. The next section looks at policy options for more effective economic cooperation among SAARC countries. Some concluding remarks are given in the last section.