from politics in 1989 after his second term as president at the age of 82; his successor Ranasinghe Premadasa was formally inaugurated on 2 January 1989. He did not re-enter politics during his retirement even after the assassination of Premadasa in 1993. Death Jayewardene died of colon cancer, on 1 November 1996, aged 90, at a hospital in Colombo. He was survived by his wife, Elina, and his son, Ravi. Legacy On the economic front, Jayewardene's legacy is decisively a positive one. His economic policies are often credited with saving the Sri Lankan economy from ruin. For thirty years after independence, Sri Lanka had struggled in vain with slow growth and high unemployment. By opening up the country for extensive foreign investments, lifting price controls and promoting private enterprise (which had taken a heavy hit because of the policies of the preceding administration), Jayewardene ensured that the island maintained healthy growth despite the civil war. William K. Steven of The New York Times observes, ''President Jayawardene's economic policies were credited with transforming the economy from one of scarcity to one of abundance.'' On the ethnic question, Jayewardene's legacy is bitterly divisive. When he took office, ethnic tensions were present in the country but were not overtly volatile. But relations between the two ethnicities heavily deteriorated during his administration and his response to these tensions and the signs of conflict has been heavily criticized. President Jayewardene saw these differences between the Sinhalese and Tamils as being ''an unbridgeable gap''. Jayewardene said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, 11 July 1983, "Really, if I starve the Tamils out, the Sinhala people will be happy" in reference to the widespread anti-Tamil sentiments among the Sinhalese at that time. Highly respected in Japan for his call for peace and reconciliation with post-war Japan at the Peace Conference in San Francisco in 1951, a statue of Jayewardene was erected at the Kamakura Temple in the Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan in his honor. J.R. Jayewardene Centre In 1988, the J.R. Jayewardene Centre was established by the J.R. Jayewardene Centre Act No. 77 of 1988 by Parliament at the childhood home of J. R. Jayewardene Dharmapala Mawatha, Colombo. It serves as archive for J.R. Jayewardene's personal library and papers as well as papers, records from the Presidential Secretariat and gifts he received in his tenure as president. Further reading De Silva, K. M., & Wriggins, W.