Hence, the new job opportunities which the pro-poor growth should create should harness these labour services in full in self-employment and in wage employment. Successful poverty alleviation should focus equally on both these types of labour engagement. When the poor are to be provided with self-employment opportunities, they should have access to land, credit, infrastructure, technology and productive inputs so as to keep their labour services continuously and gainfully employed 7 . Similarly, when the poor are to secure wage employments, both industrial and agro-based enterprises should be promoted in rural as well as urban centres. Any concentration of such enterprises in urban areas would result in an undesirable migration of the poor to urban centres and an uneven development across different regions of a country 8 . The pro-poor growth strategy in Sri Lanka, as has been the case in other countries pursuing this strategy, has placed heavy emphasis on developing the rural agricultural sector 9 . The reasoning behind this policy would have been the belief that agriculture is the main stay in the economy and the development of labour intensive agriculture as against capital intensive industry would enable the rural population to increase their income levels. However, this rural bias in growth strategy poses several problems for the sustainability of the policy. First, the policy is urban-neutral and, hence, if the incomes of the urban sector do not increase correspondingly, the rural folk would find it difficult to market their products.

The application of distributional accounts is even more significant during economic crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, where both the effects as well as the mitigating policies can differ significantly across heterogeneous households. The OECD, Eurostat, IMF, UN, and the World Bank joint effort is to provide household distributional information, in line with the national accounts’ totals, on the dimensions of income, consumption and wealth. The new G20 Data Gaps Initiatives have as well incorporated recommendations. Fintech and innovation Technological changes are transforming the financial sector and the economy in general, offering payment services, including cryptocurrencies, international remittances, and cross-border payments and credit. With market innovations also come risks. Central banks should therefore promote the global adoption of a revised classification of economic activities that takes greater account of financial technology service providers, supporting the IFC's recommendation to revise ISIC at the UN level. When new entrants fall outside the perimeter of regulation, it can be difficult to assess risks, including threats to resilience and financial stability. The advances in regulation can be leveraged for statistical purposes and should allow us to move forward in measuring the services offered by these non-bank or unregulated financial intermediaries. As regulation moves into focus into these areas we should develop, for instance, financial inclusion indicators based on the digital financial  3  services offered by Fintech companies. Cryptoassets and digital currencies are another area where regulation can be leveraged for statistical purposes.