Reviewed By Professor Chandre Dharmawardana, Ottawa, Canada.

Dr. Gavin Karunaratne, a seasoned administrator and Economist trained at the University of Michigan. He has presented to the reading public a little book of 60 pages, where he takes up cudgels against the International Monetary Fund. The story is told using his newspaper articles and editorial comments going back to almost two decades and racing up to modern times. The story begins in the era of the Ranil-Chandrika cohabitation era when Prof. Sachs, Director of the UN Millennium Project and a stalwart of the IMF visited Sri Lanka in 2003. Other western emissaries are taken up in other chapters, in the context of economic crises of various third world countries, and how the advise of these emissaries led to the enslavement of those countries to western capitalism and forces of globalization.

An attractive feature of Dr. Karunaratne’s book is that it gives a quick summary of the scope and scale of IMF action in so many third world nations. Today in Sri Lanka, the politicians in power are in lockstep with the thinking of global capitalism and the IMF. The politicians in the opposition may be ready to vociferously attack the IMF, but they too, when in power, went to the IMF with the begging bowl in hand. And yet, there is a substratum of thinking public who understand the perils of courting the IMF too closely. The rise of Brexit and Trump in recent times have unleashed movements against the very global capitalist forces that are behind the IMF.

Dr. Karunaratne’s book is not aimed at the specialist reader who will look for graphs and tables of data. Instead, it is addressed directly to the layman, without the jargon. I can recommend Dr. Karunaratne’s book to those readers who are looking for a rapid but lucid discussion of the policies of the IMF, and how they are detrimental to our sovereignty as well as to our economic well-being where the discussion is directly oriented to Sri Lanka’s concerns.

Dr. Kaurunaratne is a Peradeniya graduate who had entered the Sri Lankan Administrative Service in the Fifties when it was open only to the best, and still had the exclusive aura of the old British Civil Service. He worked in many administrative and developmental capacities; and as the Government Agent of the Matara district in the early 1970s. His subsequent Ph. D work at the Michigan State University in Rural Development made him learn much from the Comilla Programme of Rural Development. He is a regular writer on matters of national interest.

The books is available to readers at Amazon.com, via the URL:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Sabotaged-Third-World-Development-ebook/dp/B01MG9EF4Y