Debt trap, ethnic divide await Sri Lanka's new president Gotabaya Rajapaksa

The largest portion of the country's foreign debt is international sovereign bonds - 39 per cent of the total foreign debt as of 2017

With Gotabaya Rajapaksa of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) winning the election for the presidentship of our southern island neighbour decisively (in the first round of voting itself in a single preferential vote system), the world is agog about what this means for the country’s future.

The biggest concern is the economy. After the Easter bombings by radical Islamists in April killed more than 200 people and injured over 400, the prediction of every multilateral financial agency was that the country’s GDP growth would slip below the International Monetary Fund's (IMF’s) 2019 forecast of 3.5 per cent and the Asian