Indrajit coomaraswamy,
Sri Lanka
Cool calm and collected approach to central banking
South Asia is awash with highly capable central bank
chiefs, yet indrajit
“We are… creating the robust macroeconomic fundamentals
necessary for accelerating growth and employment generation”
Coomaraswamy fully deserves this award for his unstinting
professionalism and for ushering his country through some choppy waters over
the past year.
Sri Lanka is in a strange position. On the one hand
foreign investment is flooding in as are tourists, with inward arrival numbers
at a record high in 2016. Yet on the other hand, this is a highly friable
economy struggling to deal with rising national liabilities (its public debt-to-GDP
ratio is the highest in the region) a fragile currency and a narrow tax base - though
a recently passed bill aimed at simplifying the tax structure and widening the tax
base should help to tackle the last of those issues.
In light of all of such challenges, the central Bank’s
ability to keep calm and carry on has been admirable. In
an interview with Global Markets, coomaraswamy
says establishing a flexible
inflation targeting regime has successfully kept a lid on prices over the past
year with consumer inflation up 6% year – on- year in August but tipped by the central bank to
settle at around 5% by the end of the year.