Malaysia’s economy likely to grow in February 2019

• Dec 25, 2018

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s economy is likely to grow in February to April 2019, says the Department of Statistics.

In the “Malaysian Economic Indicators: Leading, Coincident and Lagging Indexes for October 2018” report released yesterday, chief statistician Datuk Seri Dr Mohd Uzir Mahidin said the annual change of the Leading Index (LI) showed an improvement to negative 0.7% in October 2018 from negative 1.7% in September 2018.

The LI is designed to monitor the economic performance direction in an average of four to six months ahead.

Concurrently, he said, the monthly change of LI augmented in October 2018, registering a growth of 1.2% to attain 119.3 points from 117.9 points in the previous month.

“This was primarily due to the increase of real imports of other basic precious and other non-ferrous metals (0.4%),” he said.

Meanwhile, the Coincident Index (CI), which examines the current economic activity, rose 1% in the reference month.

Two components that contributed significantly to the increase were volume index of retail trade (0.5%) and real contributions to EPF (0.2%t), he said.

He added that the annual change of CI grew further to 3.9% in October 2018 as against 3.4% in the previous month. — Bernama

Source: https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2018/12/25/malaysias-economy-likely-to-grow-in-february-2019/#Lu6EDDfKBYVY6xem.99