Restructuring Sri Lanka's debt talks.

There is no doubt that International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans often come with a set of conditionalities that most countries find unfavourable to implement. With its ongoing economic crisis and complex multilateral debt negotiations between creditor nations, Sri Lanka is no exception.

The IMF extended a loan of US$2.6 billion to Sri Lanka in 2009 on the condition that Colombo reduces the country's budget deficit to around 5 percent of GDP. But the island nation failed to improve its exports or growth, so it requested another IMF debt facility of about US$1.5 billion in 2016. That was also ineffective due to internal issues ranging from multiple monsoon failures derailing agricultural productivity to the politically destabilising constitutional crisis of October 2018.

Between 2015 and 2019, the country's growth rate fell from 5 percent to 2.9 percent and government revenue...