KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s economy is likely to grow in February to April 2019, says the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DoSM).
In the “Malaysian Economic Indicators: Leading, Coincident & 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 per cent in October 2018 from negative 1.7 per cent 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 per cent 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 & Other Non-ferrous Metals (0.4 per cent),” he said.
Meanwhile, the Coincident Index (CI), which examines the current economic activity, rose one per cent in the reference month.
Two components that contributed significantly to the increase were Volume Index of Retail Trade (0.5 per cent) and Real Contributions to EPF (0.2 per cent), he said, adding that the annual change of CI grew further to 3.9 per cent in October 2018 as against 3.4 per cent in the previous month. – Bernama
