of his choice. • third, the statistician may tend to over - generalise facts and make wrong conclusions. • fourth, the samples used may be biased. • fifth, the causality outlined may be fallacious. • sixth, the data may have been manipulated in order to show a result favourable to some interested party. • seventh, data may be dredged or mined in order to find a correlation that would not be there. how to gain credibility for statistics? all these instances of the misuse of statistics make the statistics less reliable and suspicious. the governmental statistical agencies throughout the globe are criticised by public on this ground. once the organisations lose credibility regarding the compilation of statistics, it would be very hard to regain trust and confidence of users. the statistical bureaus run by former soviet union and its satellite states have been subject to this criticism. the way to avoid this criticism is to adopt global best practices with regard to compilation and dissemination of statistics. it requires countries to adopt a code of ethics and practices when it comes to dissemination of information. many member countries of the international monetary fund have adopted such a code in the form of signing for following the principles of outlined in a general data dissemination system and, at a more stringent level, a special data dissemination system. the central bank of sri lanka is a signatory to the imf ’ s general data dissemination system. the final message in summary, if statisticians are desirous of supporting economic development, they should necessarily produce and supply statistics to meet the requirements of the market. it is essential that they produce such statistics as a readily usable product that could be sold in the market at a price. it is now time in sri lanka for the private statistics - producers to enter the vast market of information. the universities in this sense are in an advantageous position, because they have the best human talents with them. it is unfortunate that they sit idly on this vast wealth of resources. it is time that universities in sri lanka reorient themselves to gain advantage from the market resources and become financially self supporting. in addition, the universities should train their statistics students to become entrepreneurs of statistics rather than becoming employees of agencies that may plan to hire statisticians.

w a wijewardena : central bank – why “ economic and price stability ”? speech by mr w a wijewardena, deputy governor of the central bank of sri lanka, at the association of professional bankers, colombo, 23 march 2007. * * * an amendment effected to the monetary law act in 2002 requires the central bank of sri lanka to pursue “ economic and price stability ” as one of the two core objectives of the bank. this is somewhat a departure from the central banks in the rest of the world which have been mandated to attain only “ price stability ”. hence, it may be puzzling to many whether the central bank of sri lanka has been given an additional objective to attain. it is, therefore, timely to identify the precise meaning of this phrase “ economic and price stability ” in the context of a central bank. the amendment to the monetary law came as a part of the modernization program which the bank commenced in 2000. one of the essential ingredients of that program was to update the monetary law to be on par with the emerging global best practices. up to that time, the central bank had been entrusted with a multitude of objectives : attaining price stability, participating in economic development, preserving the external value of rupee, protecting banks from collapse and maintaining the financial system stability etc. these objectives were not very clear and were often in conflict with each other. they also posed difficulties in monitoring the progress or assessing the success. many critiques had pointed out, and the technical staff in the bank had experienced, that the bank could not succeed in its main task of taming inflation and bringing about price stability, if it was saddled with other tasks that would go against its main objective. hence, there emerged a general consensus that the central bank should do only what it can do effectively and not otherwise. that consensus required the central bank to pursue a single objective, viz., the attainment of price stability. following this consensus that emerged through the consultative process involved in the modernization, the technical staff of the bank proposed an amendment to the monetary law by mandating the bank with the task of attaining two core objectives. they were the attainment of both “ price stability ” and “ financial system stability ”. when the draft law was submitted to the then governor, mr. a. s jayawardena, for clearance, he had changed the “ price stability ” to “ economic and price stability ”. the puzzled and bewildered technical staff flocked into his room seeking a