Dr. Sanath Jayanetti is presently a Senior Academic Fellow at the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology. He has been a freelance economic consultant and lecturer with extensive experience in international trade and services, regional integration, policy development, reform, and fiscal and monetary policies. He has taught at several universities and has provided capacity-building for the Government, the private sector, and civil society, both overseas and in Sri Lanka. In addition to being a senior consultant for the Government of Sri Lanka, a Commissioner of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry on Modernization of Customs; a Trade Expert for the USAID/SAIL Project in Sri Lanka; Consultant for CHEC Port City Colombo Pvt Ltd; WTO Specialist for the Ministry of Commerce and Industries in Afghanistan; Qualitative Policy Analyst for the Ministry of Finance of the United Arab Emirates evaluating free trade agreements; Regional Integration Policy Advisor and Team Leader (long-term) in Rwanda for TradeMark East Africa; Senior Economist for the Trade and Accession Facilitation for Afghanistan; and, Senior Trade Policy Advisor (long-term) and Team Leader also in Afghanistan. Also, work entailed advising on free trade agreements concerning both goods and services in the Middle East, moving towards a Common Market in East Africa, Regional Integration Policy issues in East Africa, developing a trade and tariff policy framework for Afghanistan with policy implications in respect of Central and South Asian countries, advising the Government of Afghanistan on the accession processes of South Asia Free Trade Area, Bi-laterals and the WTO, improving the regulatory framework in trade and commerce, and on capacity building. He has worked as the Team Leader for the diagnostic study and the Technical Assistance in creating a comprehensive online database for the Sri Lanka Department of Customs regulations and procedures.

Furthermore, he has worked and advised governments in South Asia, Southern Africa (Botswana-WTO issues & Lesotho-creating a Research Policy Unit to analyze trade policies), and Eastern Africa (Ethiopia – WTO Accession Process, specifically on the WTO International Technology Agreement) regions in looking at the accession process, bilateral, regional, and multilateral agreements/negotiations, in trade in goods and services. As a Research Fellow and Head of the International Economic Policy Unit at the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) of Sri Lanka, Sanath has carried out consultancies independently and on behalf of IPS and published and presented several papers locally and internationally. As the Economic Advisor to the Department of Fiscal Policy and Economic Affairs, Sri Lanka, Sanath was involved in drafting legislation and implementing direct and indirect taxes during the late 90s. He served as a Commissioner of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry on Trade & Tariff and recently as a Member of the Presidential Committee of Experts on the Sri Lanka-Singapore Free Trade Agreement. Sanath has extensive knowledge in the development of economic modeling and forecasting tools to measure the impact of such trade and other fiscal policy reforms on economic growth and government revenues, including estimation of the structure of trade incentives, analysis of the effects of the cascading tariffs structure and the implications for industrial growth and development, para tariffs, non-tariff measures, estimation of the impact of tariff and commodity tax policy changes on government revenue, etc. 

Dr. Jayanetti has been a consultant to the ADB, the Commonwealth Secretariat, DFID, the EU, FAO, TMEA, UNDP, USAID, and the World Bank, among others. He has served as a Research Associate at the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Nebraska, creating a Nebraska Quarterly Economic Forecasting Model. He has spent over 15 years teaching economics at North Carolina State University, the University of Iowa, the University of Nebraska in the United States, the University of Colombo, and the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka. He is currently at the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology in Malabe.

·       Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Economics, 1992

University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

·       Master of Arts (MA) in Economics, 1988

The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA

·       Master of Science (MSc.) in Business Management, 1985

North Carolina State University, North Carolina, USA 

·       Bachelor of Science (BSc.) in Mathematics, 1981

University of North Carolina, North Carolina, USA

§  Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student, awarded by the College of Business Administration of the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, for the academic year 1991/92

§  Member, Omicron Delta Epsilon, International Honor Society of Economics