TOLL HIGHWAYS TO SRI LANKA FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Infrastructure facilities of a country play an important role in economic development. The highway infrastructure is more superior among other facilities and conditions of those facilities affects the economic returns of a nation indirectly. Traffic congestion is a massive problem today and improving road network properly is required to overcome such problems, most of the developing countries like Sri Lanka face lot of difficulties to uplift the road infrastructure because of unstable economic conditions and lack of investment funds. So, a few class A highways are available in the road network in Sri Lanka and no expressways have been completed so far. The concept of toll highway is initiated during last decade in the world and it is a better solution for solving funding problems in expressway constructions of developing countries.  It allows private entities to participate in infrastructure investments and there are several strategies for financing infrastructure projects on this basis. However, the first nations’ toll highway, the Colombo - Katunayake Expressway (CKE) has been held at the construction stage and there are several arguments in this country about the matching of the toll concept to our economy. Therefore, this paper is focused to discuss the concept of toll highway together with various issues relating to financing such projects in Sri Lanka.

Keywords: Colombo-Katunayake expressway, Economic development, Private sector participation, Toll highways

For full Paper: fmscresearch@sjp.ac.lk