Although Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows to Sri Lanka have ‘recovered’ in 2017, hitting the much touted USD 1 billion landmark, the underlying bottlenecks of poor ease of doing business, attracting the wrong ‘types’ of investments, and policy uncertainty have prevented Sri Lanka from ushering in optimal FDI gains throughout the post-war period. This study delves into firm-level investments in Sri Lanka’s manufacturing sector to further explore these bottlenecks. Three firm-level datasets of Board of Investments (BOI) enterprises for the years 2002, 2009, and 2016 were used for this purpose, and a comparative analysis between datasets was conducted.

1. Investments ? Sri Lanka 2. Investments, Foreign ? Sir Lanka in Sri Lanka 3. Investments, Sri Lankan 4. Sri Lanka ? Economic development