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- Wasantha Athukoala holds a doctorate in Economics from Queensland University of Technology, Australia, a M.Phil and a... moreWasantha Athukoala holds a doctorate in Economics from Queensland University of Technology, Australia, a M.Phil and a B.A. (Honours) in Economics from the University of Peradeniya, where he is working as a Professor in Economics. His research mainly includes in the field of Environmental Economics, Agricultural Economics and Sustainable Development. He has published more than 35 research papers in well known international journals which include Energy Policy, Land Use Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, Journal of Forest Economics, Sustainable Cities and Society, The Singapore Economic Review, Journal of Agricultural Economics, The Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Hydrogeology Journal, Energy Economics, Economic Analysis and Policy, Journal of Resources, Energy, and Development and Journal of Smart Economic Growth. He is the co-author of five text books and the author of two text books. He has published 10 book chapters and presented more than 40 research papers in national and international conferencesedit
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Modern commercial agricultural practices in Asia during the last three to four decades involving chemicals (fertilisers and pesticides) have been associated with large increases in food production never witnessed before, especially under... more
Modern commercial agricultural practices in Asia during the last three to four decades involving chemicals (fertilisers and pesticides) have been associated with large increases in food production never witnessed before, especially under the Green Revolution technology in South Asia. This also involves large-scale increases in commercial vegetable crops. However, the high reliance on chemical inputs to bring about these increases in food production is not without problems. A visible, parallel correlation between higher productivity, high artificial input use and environmental degradation and human ill-health is evident in many countries where commercial agriculture is widespread. In this chapter, we focus on the impact of chemical inputs, in particular the impact of pesticides on the environment and on human health in South Asia with special reference to Sri Lanka...
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Modern commercial agricultural practices in Asia during the last three to four decades involving chemicals (fertilisers and pesticides) have been associated with large increases in food production never witnessed before, especially under... more
Modern commercial agricultural practices in Asia during the last three to four decades involving chemicals (fertilisers and pesticides) have been associated with large increases in food production never witnessed before, especially under the Green Revolution technology in South Asia. This also involves large-scale increases in commercial vegetable crops. However, the high reliance on chemical inputs to bring about these increases in food production is not without problems. A visible, parallel correlation between higher productivity, high artificial input use and environmental degradation and human ill-health is evident in many countries where commercial agriculture is widespread. In this chapter, we focus on the impact of chemical inputs, in particular the impact of pesticides on the environment and on human health in South Asia with special reference to Sri Lanka...
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Research Interests: Engineering, Geography, Earth Sciences, Hydrogeology, Water quality, and 13 moreGroundwater, Sri Lanka, Agriculture, Groundwater recharge, Production economics, Crop Production, Water resource management, Agricultural Production, Technical efficiency, Onion, Water Quality, Inefficiency, and Stochastic Frontier Production Function
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... with regard to forests and forest management NCCARF Synthesis and Integrative Research Program Geoff Cockfield, Tek Maraseni, Laurie Buys, Jeffrey Sommerfeld, Clevo Wilson and Wasantha Athukorala Image: Peter Halasz ... Authors Geoff... more
... with regard to forests and forest management NCCARF Synthesis and Integrative Research Program Geoff Cockfield, Tek Maraseni, Laurie Buys, Jeffrey Sommerfeld, Clevo Wilson and Wasantha Athukorala Image: Peter Halasz ... Authors Geoff Cockfield 1 Tek Maraseni 1 ...
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Research Interests: Mechanical Engineering, Economics, Energy Economics, Agricultural Economics, Applied Economics, and 15 moreElectricity, Power Generation, Electricity prices, Electricity Consumption, Cointegration, Population Growth, Demand Elasticity, Liquefied petroleum gas, Household Income, Error Correction Model, Income Elasticity, Electrical And Electronic Engineering, Per Capita Income, Cointegration Analysis, and Electricity Demand
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This study attempts to identify the key determinants of residential demand for electricity in rural and urban households in Sri Lanka. Yearly data for 108 randomly selected households (54 from each - urban and rural) for a five years... more
This study attempts to identify the key determinants of residential demand for electricity in rural and urban households in Sri Lanka. Yearly data for 108 randomly selected households (54 from each - urban and rural) for a five years period were used for the estimation. Fixed effect model is used to determine the responsiveness of electricity consumption to its own price, differences in price, price of alternative fuel, income and variables relating to the social-economic characteristics of the household. Price elasticity and income elasticity for electricity in the urban households are estimated to be -0.38 and 0.15 while they are -0.04 and 0.14 for rural households, respectively, which confirm the previous findings, as the electricity is inelastic and a normal good. Furthermore, the estimated model demonstrates the importance of including the household level information for identifying the determinants of electricity demand, which is not possible using aggregate level data in a country.
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Poverty, inequality, economic as well as social instability and environmental degradation are common features of unsustainable development. In general, the need for sustainable development is rarely at the top of priority lists of the... more
Poverty, inequality, economic as well as social instability and environmental degradation are common features of unsustainable development. In general, the need for sustainable development is rarely at the top of priority lists of the people in developing countries because their livelihoods are mainly depended on available economic opportunities and environment variables. As a developing country, Sri Lanka has shown a progress of many aspects in sustainable development goals. However, irresponsible planning, unplanned development activities, absence of a proper monitoring as well as evaluation system and lack of knowledge on sustainable development has resulted in damaging the ecosystems over the last few decades. In this context, this study attempts to investigate the direction of some of the key environmental variables in the country. It also analyses the knowledge and attitudes of people in Sri Lanka towards the sustainable development, climate changes, forest as well as biodiver...
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Among the environmental valuation methods, the Choice Experiment (CE) method is considered to be the most appropriate method for valuing benefits of attributes related to a particular environmental commodity. This is because of the CE... more
Among the environmental valuation methods, the Choice Experiment (CE) method is considered to be the most appropriate method for valuing benefits of attributes related to a particular environmental commodity. This is because of the CE method allows not only for estimation of the value of the environmental good as a whole, but also for the implicit values of its attributes. Under this method a sample of people is asked to choose their most preferred alternatives from a sequence of grouped options that relate to different management strategies. Each option is described in terms of its outcomes and a personal monetary cost to be borne personally by the respondent. In analysing the choices made by respondents, it is possible to infer the trade-off that people are willing to make between money and greater benefits of different attributes. This paper aims at explaining the basic steps of undertaking a choice experiment study which is increasingly becoming popular technique in both the dev...
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Banana is one of the prominent cultivation fruit in Sri Lanka and at present, approximately 54 per cent of the total fruit cultivation lands are used to cultivate Banana. There is a wide range in cultivating practices and sales channels... more
Banana is one of the prominent cultivation fruit in Sri Lanka and at present, approximately 54 per cent of the total fruit cultivation lands are used to cultivate Banana. There is a wide range in cultivating practices and sales channels which all are linked together into the supply chain in the country. The domestic Banana supply chain is a good example of the fruit and vegetable supply chain of the country. This study attempts to determine the relative profitability of banana using data collected from ‘Walawa region’ during the period of July to September 2017. Total cost, profit and benefit cost ratio for indifferent marketing channels such as banana producers, wholesalers and retailers ware investigated. The results show that, the profit margin of the retailer is greater than that of the farmers and wholesalers. It is also found that average benefit cost ratio of the producer has the highest, however the retailer has the largest impact on determining the price of banana in the...
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Modern commercial agricultural practices in Asia during the last three to four decades involving chemicals (fertilisers and pesticides) have been associated with large increases in food production never witnessed before, especially under... more
Modern commercial agricultural practices in Asia during the last three to four decades involving chemicals (fertilisers and pesticides) have been associated with large increases in food production never witnessed before, especially under the Green Revolution technology in South Asia. This also involves large-scale increases in commercial vegetable crops. However, the high reliance on chemical inputs to bring about these increases in food production is not without problems. A visible, parallel correlation between higher productivity, high artificial input use and environmental degradation and human ill-health is evident in many countries where commercial agriculture is widespread. In this chapter, we focus on the impact of chemical inputs, in particular the impact of pesticides on the environment and on human health in South Asia with special reference to Sri Lanka...
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Research Interests:
The study of ecosystem services (ES) is becoming increasingly popular, as it plays an important role in human wellbeing, economic growth, and livelihoods. The primary goal of this research is to investigate the global trend in ES research... more
The study of ecosystem services (ES) is becoming increasingly popular, as it plays an important role in human wellbeing, economic growth, and livelihoods. The primary goal of this research is to investigate the global trend in ES research using a rigorous systematic review of highly cited articles. The articles for this study were extracted from Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E), Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) databases of Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) covering the period from 2000 to 2020. This study was limited to SCI-E, ESCI, and SSCI databases of the Web of Science. The term “ecosystem service/s” has been used as a research term to filter the study sample and eliminate other databases from the analysis. A citation level equal to or greater than 200 was used to further filtration of articles. This query could restrict to 128 articles that are highly cited in the selected period. Bibliometric analysis results show t...
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Sri Lanka’s education system was suddenly shifted from classroom-based free education to online-based distance learning as an emergency teaching and learning method (ETLM) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. This study examines... more
Sri Lanka’s education system was suddenly shifted from classroom-based free education to online-based distance learning as an emergency teaching and learning method (ETLM) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. This study examines how various stakeholders used online-based distant learning as an ETLM, and highlights the lessons learned from such a transition in Sri Lanka through a case study of the Kandy education zone (KEZ), in response to the country’s COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. We obtained the data through a questionnaire survey from 19 schools in KEZ, selecting the teachers, students, and parents as a survey sample. The findings revealed that nearly 64.7% of teachers used social media for the teaching–learning process (TLP), 27.9% used standard online teaching platforms, and only 7.4% used traditional teaching methods during the pandemic lockdown. Additionally, 36.5% of teachers and 41.2% of students favored the WhatsApp mobile application for the TLP, while others pref...
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This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Research Interests:
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Research Interests:
This study investigates farmer preferences for banana diversity in Sri Lanka. First, it investigate farmers' attitudes towards banana cultivation in the country. Secondly, it also estimate diversity selection models to identify the... more
This study investigates farmer preferences for banana diversity in Sri Lanka. First, it investigate farmers' attitudes towards banana cultivation in the country. Secondly, it also estimate diversity selection models to identify the important factors that contribute to the conservation of banana diversity. The analysis uses survey data covering 450 banana growers in three different districts representing different climatic zones in the country.
Sri Lanka has experienced a variety of natural disasters that have had a disastrous impact on human wellbeing as well as economic welfare of the country. Available data shows that after 1970s, number of both intensive and extensive... more
Sri Lanka has experienced a variety of natural disasters that have had a disastrous impact on human wellbeing as well as economic welfare of the country. Available data shows that after 1970s, number of both intensive and extensive disasters have been increasing in the country by causing considerable impacts on human life, shelter, livelihood and the economy. The most frequently reported disaster events in Sri Lanka are bushfires, floods, extreme wind events, landslides, lightning and droughts. In general, people take rational decisions of investing in mitigation activities if they understand not only the value of physical impacts of natural disasters, but also their likely social and economic consequences. Given this background this study investigates peoples’ investment on mitigating activities for floods in Rathnapura and Matara districts in Sri Lanka. Floods and landslides are very common in these districts and prolonged duration of floods in many affected areas in the district...
One of the most prominent casualties of a natural disaster is the property market. The private and social costs from such events typically run into millions of dollars. In this chapter we use a dataset to examine the impact of natural... more
One of the most prominent casualties of a natural disaster is the property market. The private and social costs from such events typically run into millions of dollars. In this chapter we use a dataset to examine the impact of natural disasters on residential house prices using a hedonic property (HP) values approach. Data before and after both a wildfire and floods, which affected Rockhampton in central coastal part of the state of Queensland, Australia are used. The data is unique because one of Rockhampton’s suburb was affected by wildfires and another by floods. For the analysis, three suburbs namely Frenchville, Park Avenue and Norman Gardens are used. Frenchville was significantly affected by wildfires in the latter part of 2009 and to a lesser extent in 2012, while Park Avenue was affected by floods at the end of 2010, January 2011, 2012 and 2013. Norman Gardens, which was relatively unaffected, is used as a control site. This enables us to examine the before and after effect...
A plethora of literature exists on irrigation development. However, only a few studies analyse the distributional issues associated with irrigation induced technological changes (IITC) in the context of commodity markets. Furthermore,... more
A plethora of literature exists on irrigation development. However, only a few studies analyse the distributional issues associated with irrigation induced technological changes (IITC) in the context of commodity markets. Furthermore, these studies deal with only the theoretical arguments and to date no proper investigation has been conducted to examine the long-term benefits of adopting modern irrigation technology. This study investigates the long-term benefit changes of irrigation induced technological changes using data from Sri Lanka with reference to rice farming. The results show that (1) adopting modern technology on irrigation increases the overall social welfare through consumption of a larger quantity at a lower cost (2) the magnitude, sensitivity and distributional gains depend on the price elasticity of demand and supply as well as the size of the marketable surplus (3) non-farm sector gains are larger than farm sector gains (4) the distribution of the benefits among di...
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The assessment of the vulnerability of Australian forests to climate change is an initiative of the Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council (NRMMC). The National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) was approached... more
The assessment of the vulnerability of Australian forests to climate change is an initiative of the Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council (NRMMC). The National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) was approached to carry out such a comprehensive Forest Vulnerability Assessment (FVA). NCCARF engaged four research groups to investigate distinct aspects in relation to the vulnerability of forests, each of which has produced a report. In addition a fifth group was engaged to create a summary and synthesis report of the project. This report – Socio-economic implications of climate change with regard to forests and forest management - is the third in the series. Through a review of literature this part of the FVA project was established to identify the potential socio-economic impacts of climate change and develop a framework for thinking about coordinated responses to socially and economically adverse outcomes. This report is based predominantly on a literature ...
Sri Lanka’s education system was suddenly shifted from classroom-based free education to online-based distance learning as an emergency teaching and learning method (ETLM) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. This study examines... more
Sri Lanka’s education system was suddenly shifted from classroom-based free education to online-based distance learning as an emergency teaching and learning method (ETLM) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. This study examines how various stakeholders used online-based distant learning as an ETLM, and highlights the lessons learned from such a transition in Sri Lanka through a case study of the Kandy education zone (KEZ), in response to the country’s COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. We obtained the data through a questionnaire survey from 19 schools in KEZ, selecting the teachers, students, and parents as a survey sample. The findings revealed that nearly 64.7% of teachers used social media for the teaching–learning process (TLP), 27.9% used standard online teaching platforms, and only 7.4% used traditional teaching methods during the pandemic lockdown. Additionally, 36.5% of teachers and 41.2% of students favored the WhatsApp mobile application for the TLP, while others pref...
Research Interests:
Sri Lanka’s education system was suddenly shifted from classroom-based free education to online-based distance learning as an emergency teaching and learning method (ETLM) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. This study examines... more
Sri Lanka’s education system was suddenly shifted from classroom-based free education to online-based distance learning as an emergency teaching and learning method (ETLM) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. This study examines how various stakeholders used online-based distant learning as an ETLM, and highlights the lessons learned from such a transition in Sri Lanka through a case study of the Kandy education zone (KEZ), in response to the country’s COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. We obtained the data through a questionnaire survey from 19 schools in KEZ, selecting the teachers, students, and parents as a survey sample. The findings revealed that nearly 64.7% of teachers used social media for the teaching–learning process (TLP), 27.9% used standard online teaching platforms, and only 7.4% used traditional teaching methods during the pandemic lockdown. Additionally, 36.5% of teachers and 41.2% of students favored the WhatsApp mobile application for the TLP, while others pref...