Top economists call for halt to Sri Lanka debt repayments after Cyclone Ditwah

Group of 120 experts including Joseph Stiglitz urge fresh debt restructuring plan given scale of destruction

A group of the world’s top economists – including the Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz – have called for Sri Lanka’s debt payments to be suspended as it tackles the devastation caused by Cyclone Ditwah.

More than 600 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed across the island, in what Sri Lanka’s president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, called the “largest and most challenging natural disaster in our history”.