‘GMOA strike misses the point’

A senior government adviser said the State doctors’ strike opposing the Sri Lanka’s free trade agreement (FTA) with Singapore was misguided.

“I think they’re just plain wrong about the economics,” Prof. Ricardo Hausmann at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute in Colombo on Wednesday said.

Hausmann is the director for the Centre for International Development at Harvard University and an advisor to the Sri Lanka Board of Investment.

The Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA) launched an island-wide token strike on Thursday morning. They argued that the Sri Lanka-Singapore FTA would allow foreign medical professionals to take Sri Lankan jobs.

But “the people who should be making that argument are the doctors in Singapore,”Hausmann said.