Business Economics

There are three main objectives of this study. The first is to measure the regional (provincial level) income inequality in Sri Lanka in recent past with a decomposable inequality measure. The second is to quantify the determinants of recent trends in regional

This paper investigates causes of trends and structural changes in labour market in Sri Lanka during 1963-2006 period. Total labour force has increased nearly three times while generating slow growth in employment during the past fifty years. Unemployment rate had been prevailing at higher level until late 1970s. Main reasons behind the drastic decline of it in 1990s have been the sizable slowdown in population growth since 1970s, high international migration rate, expansion of education levels, and urban informal sector economic activities after 1977. None of these factors have been directly contributing to increase output in the economy. Contrary, significant structural changes in employment, unemployment and underemployment have been undergone in terms of gender, age, education level, sector, industry and profession. Finally, labour market has operated by creating many push factors for international migration such as low real wages, high unemployment and underemployment rates, discriminations in terms of gender, age, sector, industry, profession and level of education.

Although growth of foreign workers in Japan has been the lowest among the OECD countries, their structural changes in terms of country of origin, age, gender, profession, industry, size of the firm and types of works have significantly diversified during the past three decades. Total number of registered foreign workers in Japan increased from 260,000 in 1990 to 876,942 in 2003 by 237 percent. Out of this growth 86 percent was recorded by temporary workers. The share of Korean workers has been declining while workers came from China and other Asian countries have been increasing during the same period. Sri Lanka has been recording as one of the highest number of migrant sending countries to Japan during the past few years. The number of registered Sri Lankans in Japan increased from 1,206 people in 1990 to over 12,000 people in late 2006. By using available macro level data and sample survey of 100 Sri Lankan migrant workers in Japan this paper attempted to elaborate these relations.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of trade liberalization on wage inequality in Sri Lanka. For this purpose, both micro and macro level labour income and wage data were used. After explaining the special features of the economy, attempts were made to examine wage trends and causes of inequalities in terms of ownership of firms, gender, occupation, skill levels and sector of production. Mean income of the male legislators, senior officials and managers was two times higher than the national average income and females in the same categories. Generally, real wage increases in exporting sector in comparison to other sectors and number of government employees decline with trade liberalization activities. Sri Lanka has shown contrary situation during the past 30 years.

Rapid phase of globalization has generated a large number of migrant workers in some countries while increasing the number of foreign-born students, professionals and residents in some other countries. As a result, the second group of countries subsequently benefited from the growing number of immigrant entrepreneurs while the first group had to undergo structural changes in migrant population due to internal and external pressure forces. Japan belonged to the first group of countries by inheriting a low proportion of immigrant entrepreneurs. Further, Japan has also been recording a declining total population and low proportion of immigrant population in comparison to other advanced nations. However, structure of the foreign-born population in Japan has been shifting from unskilled (undocumented) migrants to growing number of foreign-born trainees and students in recent past due to de-industrialization, internal policy changes and changing phase of globalization. Learning language, culture, societal norms and familiarizing with the living patterns along with inherited professional skills assist people to better assimilate in the host societies. Assimilation provide access to resources and opportunities to initiate and sustain entrepreneurial activities and convert people from migrant workers to immigrant entrepreneurs. On the other hand, promoting entrepreneurship among foreign-born students and professionals will generate access and opportunities to ethnic resources and ethnic markets in their home countries. Therefore, when de-industrialization is continuing and internal employment opportunities are declining, promotion of immigrant entrepreneurship is the most viable path of economic progress even for an advanced nation like Japan. Since the number of Sri Lankans in Japan has also been shifting from undocumented migrant workers to a growing number of students and permanent settlers in recent past, this study focuses on development patterns of immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan and their implications for Sri Lanka and Japan. After a lengthy survey of literature on immigrant entrepreneurship in general as well as in Japan, this study analyses data collected from 100 Sri Lankan immigrant business entrepreneurs in Japan to learn lessons from their experience and recommend policy alternatives to both home and host countries.

The study investigates the macroeconomic determents of tourist arrivals in Sri Lanka, using annually series of the corresponding econometrics techniques were used to analyze data. The statistical techniques used include the unit root Augmented Dickey Fuller test in order to fulfill the objective of stationary for al The results from granger causality test revealed that past behavior of gross domestic production, gross domestic per capita income, government expenditure on capital and net lending, imports of goods, exports of goods and foreign direct behavior of tourist arrivals in Sri Lanka. The regression analysis it showed that all macroeconomic variables are strongly linear associated with tourist arrivals. The VECM model has revealed t exists long run relationship between tourist arrivals and those variables. The results derived in this study can be effectively used for implementation of new strategies to attract more tourists to Sri Lanka.

The aim of this paper is to review published documents on immigrant entrepreneurship in conceptual, theoretical and empirical perspectives and summarize existing studies on immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan including Sri Lankans. Findings of this paper indicates several gaps to be addressed for further development of research on immigrant entrepreneurship in Japan as (1) it is a relatively new concept and a limited number of studies have been conducted due to small size of foreign born population and their scatted nature, wider language and cultural differences, insufficient macro-level data and difficulties in accessing micro-level information; (2) there are enough evidences to show that the number of immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan have been increasing in recent past and are predicted to increase in future; (3) most of the existing Asian immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan have emerged through migrant workers, assets generated in Japan and married to Japanese; (4) since services and ICT sectors have been expanding, foreigners have new avenues to start businesses in Japan (5) the large number of SMEs in Japan still focus on local markets with high technical abilities and suffer due to the limited access to Asian markets, although mutual benefits can be expanded if they have wider access to develop linkages with immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan; and finally, (6) internalization of immigrant businesses in Japan (export orientation, mergers and acquisition of foreign firms and assets, joint ventures and FDI projects started in collaboration with Japanese banks) has been a new phenomenon in the literature of immigrant entrepreneurship in the 21 st century. Therefore, immigrant entrepreneurship continues to remain as an unexplored research field in Japan.

Even though the number and share of foreign-born population in Japan has been low in comparison to other advanced countries, their composition has diversified in many aspects such as in the type of visa, profession, ethnicity, location and level of assimilation during the past two decades. There are enough evidences to show that the number of immigrant entrepreneurs have grown in Japan during the past few years. Therefore, this study focuses on development patterns of Sri Lankan immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan and their implications for Sri Lanka-Japan business relations. There were five main objectives to conduct this study as ; (1) To investigate Japan-Sri Lanka business relations with micro-level data collected from Sri Lankans in Japan; (2) To investigate business situations and concurrent business challenges facing by Sri Lankan immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan; (3) To examine and identify the business relations (networks) of Sri Lankan immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan; (4) To understand the level of contribution made by them to promote Japan-Sri Lanka Business activities and economic relations; (5) To evaluate business performance of Sri Lankan immigrant business entrepreneurs who participated for Survey conducted by the author in 2007/2008. Participatory observations, focus group discussions and in-depth interviews were conducted by the author in Japan from September 2016 to March 2017.
This study analyses data collected from in-depth interviews of 100 Sri Lankan immigrant business entrepreneurs in Japan to learn lessons from their experience and recommend policy alternatives to both home and host countries. One of the aims of this study was to review published documents on immigrant entrepreneurship in conceptual, theoretical and empirical perspectives and summarize existing studies on immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan including Sri Lankans. On one hand, the number of business visa holders (Keiei kanri) in Japan increased from 7,342 in 2006 by 2.8 times to reach at 20,117, in 2016. On the other hand, regional distribution pattern of foreigners and Sri Lankans in Japan have shown two different patterns in 2006 and 2016. Foreigners living in Japan have more concentrated into Tokyo and Osaka areas while Sri Lankans have concentrated more into Ibaraki, Chiba, Kanagawa, Nagoya and Tochigi prefectures during the same period. In order to explore reasons behind these characteristics, the author conducted a focus group discussion with the participation of 30 Sri Lankan immigrant entrepreneurs who are members of Sri Lanka Automobile Exporters Association in Japan (SLAEAJ). Findings confirm that Sri Lankan Immigrant entrepreneurs were concentrated into places where resources, opportunities,
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industries are available, and easy accesses to automobile auctions, vehicle yards and shipping facilities are located.
Findings of this study indicates several gaps to be addressed for further development of research on immigrant entrepreneurship in Japan as (1) it is a relatively new concept and a limited number of studies have been conducted due to small size of foreign born population and their scatted nature, wider language and cultural differences, insufficient macro-level data and difficulties in accessing micro-level information; (2) there are enough evidences to show that the number of immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan have been increasing in recent past and are predicted to increase in future; (3) most of the existing Asian immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan have emerged through migrant workers, assets generated in Japan and married to Japanese; (4) since services and ICT sectors have been expanding, foreigners have new avenues to start businesses in Japan (5) the large number of SMEs in Japan still focus on local markets with high technical abilities and suffer due to the limited access to Asian markets, although mutual benefits can be expanded if they have wider access to develop linkages with immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan; and finally, (6) internalization of immigrant businesses in Japan (export orientation, mergers and acquisition of foreign firms and assets, joint ventures and FDI projects started in collaboration with Japanese banks) has been a new phenomenon in the literature of immigrant entrepreneurship in the 21st century. Therefore, immigrant entrepreneurship continues to remain as an unexplored research field in Japan.
The author estimates that among the Sri Lankans in Japan, around 44% are engage in used vehicle trade and 38% are running restaurants and engaged in food, tea and spices selling industry during the concerning period. Sri Lankan Immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan at present are well-established, educated and they do not have problems such as language speaking, food selection or cultural assimilation. Most of them are married to Japanese, financially strong and have entered into diversified stage of their businesses within Japan and into other countries. Use of innovations, export orientation and high assimilation into Japanese society and economy were identified as special characteristics of Sri Lankan immigrant entrepreneurs in Japan. Regional distribution patterns of foreigners are different due to the differences in the type of industries they are engaged in Japan.

Cricket is a word that arouses so many different feelings such as passion, team spirit, exuberance and the undying yearning to win, to many different people. The few things which keep such strong desires in check are the friendly, sentimental value of winning and losing together. However, as vision, money and strategy comes in to the picture of sports, everything takes a fierce turn. This is where the topic of sports and business meets the theme of sports entrepreneurship; a theme which brings the best out of sports and its ability to be a money maker. This is the theme on which this study was based upon. Highlighting the success of IPL in India and the failure of SLPL in Sri Lanka, this study attempts to discover the ground level factors on which the success of such a business model depends upon. Data collected from 321 stakeholders of the SLPL, using a convenient sampling method, were used and factor analysis with Varimax Kaiser Normalization was employed to generate the factors. Results indicated that Marketing Strategy, Franchise Owners Capabilities, Transparency and Cultural Diversity are the major factors influence the success of such a mega sport event.