Sri Lanka: Progress and Remaining Challenges in Online Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic 1 KEY POINTS • Sri Lanka made a remarkable transition to online higher education soon after the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic began in 2020. Take-up of online higher education had improved further by December 2021 with the use of quality videoconferencing systems such as Zoom.

This study estimates the technical and allocative efficiency of paddy farming in Sri Lanka. Household-specific technical efficiencies were computed using cross-sectional data collected from the household survey conducted in 2014 using a Stochastic Frontier approach. The Cobb-Douglas functional form was adopted for the frontier production function and the distributional assumption made for the inefficiency term was half normal. The results of this study show that the estimated mean technical efficiency of the farmers is 78.32 percent, suggesting there is a scope of 21.68 percent to increase paddy productivity using present technology. The estimated Returns to Scale is 0.2806, which implies that a proportional increase in all factors of production leads to a less than proportional increase in paddy productivity. Age, schooling, alcohol consumption, agricultural training, farmers' attitudes, and the distance between the land and the main watercourse are significant determinants of technical efficiency. According to the analysis of allocative efficiency, there exists inefficiency in allocating resources, where land and machinery resources are underutilised while labour is over utilised.

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This study aims to examine the effect of remittances on the standard of living of the remittance receiving households in Sri Lanka. Survey data were analyzed using thematic analysis and stratified matching method in propensity score matching. It was found that, a large majority of labour migrants remit money to their households left behind. However, the volume of remittances varies with the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the labour migrants and their households. Furthermore, it was found that remittance receiving households enjoy income from diversified sources. Average treatment effects estimated through stratified matching analysis reveal that remittance receivers enjoy a higher level of income and higher standard of living compared to their non-remittance receiving counterparts. Improvement of the income by the remittances varies with the income quintile of the households.KeywordsMigration, Propensity Score Matching, Remittances, Sri Lanka

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