Sri Lanka has embarked on a focused path towards ensuring macro-economic and financial system stability, having faced strong headwinds from the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic resulted in a substantial loss of foreign exchange revenues to the country, but unprecedented support provided by the Government and the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), from fiscal, monetary and public health aspects, has helped a strong rebound of the economy as well as a considerable recovery in some foreign exchange earning sectors. The tourism sector is also expected to display a notable recovery in the period ahead, and concerted efforts are taken to improve worker remittance inflows through formal channels. Recent tensions in the forex market have also highlighted the need for Sri Lanka to increase its reliance on foreign exchange earnings over time to strengthen the economy, rather than increasing its foreign borrowings which exposes the economy to various types of shocks.
In this context, in February 2021, the CBSL issued Rules under the provisions of the Monetary Law Act to reinforce the prevailing repatriation requirement on proceeds of merchandise exports and ensure the conversion of a given share of such proceeds within a specific period of time. These Rules that had been based on similar rules of neighbouring countries, had been fine-tuned from time to time upon requests made by the business community, while those have also helped to ease foreign exchange liquidity issues faced by the domestic market to some extent, with a gradual improvement in repatriation and conversion of export proceeds. In addition, with mandatory sales of export proceeds converted under the aforesaid Rules by licensed banks, the CBSL has been able to purchase a reasonable quantum of forex from the market thus far during the year, which the CBSL has utilised to part-finance the import of essential commodities to the country during the past few weeks.