About Local Tourism Earnings

Writing with reference to your Business Page headline of 5th November: “Local tourism earnings clouded by outdated accounting.” It is deeply troubling that Sri Lanka continues to measure tourism income using incomplete, outdated methods — and then uses those figures as the basis for national development decisions.
How can we classify tourism as the 3rd largest foreign exchange earner when the computation is based on a sample survey of departing tourists? Is this not a suicidal foundation for policy?
For more than 50 years, neither the Tourism Ministry, nor the Tourist Board, nor even Immigration has corrected this glaring systemic gap.
Globally, the WTO and OECD tourism satellite accounting framework clearly requires netting out high import content — expatriate salaries, foreign borrowing repayment, imported meat, basmati rice, liquor and beverages — before arriving at net national forex benefit.
Sri Lanka must urgently move to internationally accepted accounting — not convenient fiction.
Upali Weerasinghe