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 : the role of statistics and challenges for statisticians keynote address by mr w a wijewardena, deputy governor of the central bank of sri lanka, at the stat day, organized by university of colombo, colombo, 26 march 2009. * * * consciously or unconsciously, we use statistics in everything we do in our day to day life. when we say that it rained yesterday, we simply pronounce a fact we have observed as having happened. when we say that it is raining now, we again mention something that we have observed as happening. when we say that it will rain tomorrow, we are predicting a future event. our life is full of such statements : facts that have been experienced by us in the past, facts that are happening now and being experienced in the present and facts that we feel would happen in the future. what has happened and is happening now are our personal experiences. what will happen are our learned judgements based on our experiences. if we keep these experiences and learned judgments to ourselves, then, it would not form the subject matter of statistics. it becomes statistics only when we share them with others. hence, statistics is basically, observing, analysing, learning and sharing facts about the real world. that sharing of facts need not necessarily be in quantitative or measurable form. they can be simple expressions in verbal form so that others could form opinions on the happenings in the real world. statistics do not have a heart or a religion when we express our personal experiences, we step into a dangerous territory. our personal experiences are guided by our emotional and subjective feelings. when we share them with others, we are inviting them to accept our emotional and subjective feelings as if they too have experienced the same. this is where we run into problems. unless others too have the same emotional and subjective feelings, there is no reason for them to accept our experiences as their experiences. hence, statistics to be shared by everyone should necessarily be based on objective considerations. in other words, statistics should not have a heart. its religion should be pure objectivity. it should convey facts as has been observed by an individual free from personal biases or prejudices. only such an impersonal statistical framework has the capability of serving people intending to use them for making judgments about the real world. how economic development occurs? an economy has to play a specific role towards its members. it has to produce and supply goods and services as demanded by them