KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysian economy is expected to continue growing but at a slower rate in the months ahead based on the leading and coincident indices released by the Statistics Department.
The leading index (LI), which monitors the economic performance in advance, showed an increase of 0.9% to 118.6 points in July compared with 117.6 points in June, it said on Wednesday.
“The two components that recorded the highest percentage increase were expected sales value in manufacturing sector (0.8%) and real imports of semi conductors (0.3%),” it said.
The annual change of LI grew at a slower pace of 0.3% in the reference month as against 0.8% in June.
The coincident index (CI), which measures the current economic activity, declined 1.2% in July.
The department said capacity utilisation in manufacturing sector that fell 0.5% is one of the components that significantly attributed to the decrease.
The annual change of CI grew at 0.4%, lower than 1.4% in the previous month, the agency added.
As for the annual change of LI and CI, there was a slower growth as compared to the preceding month.
The diffusion index for the LI showed an improvement even though it remains below 50%.
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