Sri Lanka’s Economic Census will be carried out over two years, 2026 and 2027, with the work divided according to the size and formality of the businesses being counted, Director General of the Department of Census and Statistics Mrs. K.M.D.S.D. Karunaratne has said.
The census is intended to gather comprehensive information on both agricultural and non-agricultural economic activity, the Daily Mirror reported on Wednesday.
How the two years are split
2026 carries two components at once. Information on agricultural activities will be collected during the year. In parallel, non-agricultural activity will be counted at formal establishments with more than 50 employees in the industry, trade and services sectors.
2027 takes the harder half. The census will then cover non-agricultural economic activities at establishments with fewer than 50 workers — and, significantly, both formal and informal establishments.
That sequencing puts the large, registered, easily-located firms in the first year and the long tail of small and unregistered businesses in the second. It is the informal component that most affects how much of the economy a census of this kind actually sees, and it is the part scheduled last.
The agricultural half follows an international standard
Karunaratne said the agricultural component would be conducted in line with the international recommendations prepared for the 2020 census round, including the FAO World Programme for the Census of Agriculture (WCA-2020) recommendations — the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s framework that allows national agricultural censuses to be compared across countries.
The Department’s own standing subject pages maintain the same division, listing the Economic Census (Agricultural activities) and the Economic Census (Non-agricultural activities) as separate programmes.
What it is for
The census will provide updated information on the structure and scale of economic activity in the country and assist future planning, policymaking and economic decision-making, Karunaratne said. No other purpose, and no cost figure, is given in the filing.
Context
This desk reported in September that field data collection for the agricultural census was due to begin in October, with enumerator training first — described then by the Department as a component of an economic census conducted once every ten years. Wednesday’s statement is the first account from the Department of the full two-year programme and of how the non-agricultural side is to be divided.
Not reported
The filing gives no start or end dates within either year, no enumerator numbers, and no budget. It does not say how informal establishments will be identified in 2027, which is the central practical difficulty in counting them, nor whether the online collection method the Department has previously used for establishments will be applied to the smaller firms.
The Daily Mirror’s report does not address how this two-year schedule relates to earlier descriptions of the non-agricultural census, which the Department has elsewhere labelled a 2025/2026 exercise. This desk could not establish from a verified newsroom whether the timetable has moved or whether the two labels refer to different phases of the same programme, and no confirmation either way is published here.
No other verified newsroom had filed on this announcement at the time of writing.
