He said people who had moved abroad would come back if conditions if education and health system quality was better.
"But the key thing to this is to have a good quality health system and an affordable education system across the country, so that then people who make money would like to come and work here," he said.
"When you get a taste of working abroad , you get used to a different type of health care and a different type of education and when you want to come back very often the other side of the family says no.
"People are paranoid about health care.
You have to invest more where private sector comes later and the government has to keep on investing.
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Sri Lanka has 15 tax-payer funded state universities and privately owned institutions are mostly affiliated colleges, which do not award their own degrees.
The government has started a process to approve non-state entities to award degrees ending a strict state monopoly that had long denied the freedom for people to educate th