The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has affirmed Sri Lanka’s subscription to the Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS) on 3 November 2015. This is a milestone in the improvement of Sri Lanka’s macroeconomic statistics to a higher standard.

The SDDS intends to guide member economies that have, or might seek, access to international capital markets in the provision of their economic and financial data to the public. The GDDS is a statistical framework to guide member economies with Economic Research Department less developed statistical systems to evaluate their data improvement needs and setting priorities.

An economy can benefit from adopting the SDDS in numerous ways, mainly through consistency in data compilation, improved data quality and transparency. Studies have shown that major benefits accrued from subscription to the SDDS include lower sovereign bond spreads, lower exchange rate volatility, favourable credit ratings, higher investment returns and lower spreads for corporate borrowers.

The Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), as the coordinating agency for implementing the SDDS in Sri Lanka, has been working in collaboration with other data dissemination authorities such as the Ministry of Finance and the Department of Census and Statistics, to make the subscription to the SDDS a success.

Sri Lanka has satisfied all the SDDS requirements in relation to the dissemination of required data categories in accordance with the prescribed coverage, periodicity and timeliness.

A successful trial run was carried out under the close monitoring of the IMF since March 2015, which confirmed Sri Lanka’s commitment to providing statistics as per the SDDS requirements.