Malaysia’s economy likely to grow in Feb to April 2019

Malaysia’s economy is likely to grow in February to April 2019, according to the performance of Malaysian Economic Indicators: Leading, Coincident & Lagging Indexes for October 2018 that was released last monday. Chief statistician Malaysia Datuk Seri Dr Mohd Uzir Mahidin said the monthly change of Leading Index (LI) augmented in October 2018, registering a growth of 1.2% to attain 119.3 points from 117.9 points in the previous month, primarily due to the increase of real imports of other basic precious & other non-ferrous metals (0.4%).

“The annual change of LI showed an improvement from negative 1.7% in September 2018 to negative 0.7% in October 2018. The composite of LI is designed to monitor the economic performance direction in an average of four to six months ahead,” he said in a statement.

On the same note, he stated that the Coincident Index (CI), which reflects the current economic activity, rose 1.0% in October 2018. Two components that contributed significantly to the increase were volume index of retail trade (0.5%) and real contributions to EPF (0.2%). At the same time, the annual change of CI grew further to 3.9% in October 2018 as against 3.4% in the previous month.