IMF says Sri Lanka signing up to their standards a “major step forward”

5 November 2015 02:50 am

Sri Lanka’s subscription to International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS) is a “major step forward” for official economic statistics in the country, the IMF said in a statement. 

“The subscription to the standard underscores Sri Lanka’s strong commitment to transparency, as well as the adoption of internationally accepted best practices in statistics,” IMF Statistics Department Director Louis Marc Ducharme said.

Sri Lanka is the 15th country to graduate to the SDDS from the IMF’s General Data Dissemination System (GDDS), in which the country has participated since July 14, 2000.

Also, Sri Lanka is the 12th jurisdiction in the Asia and Pacific region to subscribe to the SDDS. “We believe that this is essential for a better understanding of the Sri Lankan economy by investors, and we are committed to continue working with the IMF towards strengthening our statistical systems further,” Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) Governor Arjuna Mahendran said. The SDDS, established by the IMF in March 1996, is intended to guide members in the provision of economic and financial data to the public.  The SDDS identifies four dimensions of data dissemination—data coverage, periodicity, and timeliness; access by the public; the integrity of the data; and data quality.  Although voluntary, a subscribing member commits to observe the standard and to provide information (metadata) to the IMF about its data dissemination practices.  This information is made publicly available on the IMF’s Dissemination Standards Bulletin Board (DSBB). The DSBB now provides comprehensive documentation in English on the statistical practices of Sri Lanka for SDDS data categories, hyperlinked to country data included in the National Summary Data Page, maintained by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. 

Sri Lanka’s SDDS information is available at http://dsbb.imf.org/Pages/SDDS/CtyCtgList.aspx?ctycode=LKA.