On receipt of the draft working paper prior to its publication, Economists at the Economic Research Department of the Central Bank carefully studied the data, methodology, econometric techniques, plausibility and consistency of the findings of the working paper in terms of the general and accepted research methods adopted by scientific researchers. Based on such study, the Central Bank Economists found serious technical deficiencies in the model used by the IMF staff member since it contained a number of highly misleading and implausible findings. The fact that the model could only explain 25 per cent of the movements in the inflation, and the fact that the author had attempted to attribute the residual inflation (balance 75%) to domestic policies (such as "loose monetary and fiscal policies") without further disaggregation is clearly not an acceptable model that any reputed economist would have applied.

Further, the model does not even examine the impact of monetary and fiscal policies on inflation. In addition, the Economists at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka replicated the results by running the same Vector Auto Regression (VAR) model, and when doing so came across several technical deficiencies. In point of fact, the author’s finding that higher oil prices have reduced Sri Lanka’s inflation is obviously highly implausible and indicates the invalidity of the model. Based on its findings, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka forwarded comments on the paper highlighting the weaknesses in the study with a view to helping the author to improve the paper to a publishable standard. Sadly, however, the author has failed to understand the technical comments and published the sub standard paper with its glaring imperfections. The inability to grasp the technical comments provided by the Central Bank also reflects the lack of professionalism on the part of those who approved the paper for distribution as well.