The failure of financial liberalization reforms in several developing countries in recent years has led to a reassessment of the McKinnon-Show financial liberalization paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to delineate the key issues of the debate and to throw some light on them by systematically tracing out the Sri Lankan financial policy reforms initiated in 1977. Our results challenge the neo-structuralist proposition that financial liberalization is merely a theoretical aberration unrelated to the objective conditions of developing countries and suggest that the lackluster outcome of reforms emanates mostly from their half-hearted nature, and policy inconsistencies and mistakes that crop up in the implementation process. [G 18]