Overview

Malaysian economy is anticipated to face challenges in preserving the recovery momentum 

Malaysia’s Leading Index (LI) which acts as an indicator on the future movement of the overall economy eased to 6.9 per cent in May 2021 (April 2021: 15.7%) based on year-on-year comparison. The growth was driven by Real Imports of Other Basic Precious & Other Non-ferrous Metals and Number of Housing Units Approved. Concomitantly, the LI declined by 2.9 per cent month-on-month. Real Imports of Other Basic Precious & Other Non-ferrous Metals (-1.2%) particularly platinum was amongst the components that underpinned the decrease of LI. The growth rate of smoothed LI remained above trend, however moving downwards which the Malaysian economy is anticipated to face challenges in preserving the recovery momentum. The emergence of new lethal variant of the COVID-19 has triggered pessimistic sentiment at global and national frontiers. Further to this, prolong movement restrictions in safeguarding lives may affect the prospects of recovery.

In view of Coincident Index (CI) which indicates the economic performance in the reference month, the CI slowed to 10.0 per cent in May 2021 after registering 20.2 per cent annual growth in April 2021. On the contrary, the monthly performance of CI decreased 1.3 per cent in May 2021 attributed by a significant dropped in Volume Index of Retail Trade (-1.2%), primarily caused by the descended of 15.8 per cent in Retail Sale of Automotive Fuel in Specialised Stores.

The Diffusion Index for LI indicated an improvement in May 2021 to register 71.4 per cent as against 57.1 per cent in April 2021. Meanwhile, the Diffusion index for CI remained at 66.7 per cent.

The complete indicators on Leading, Coincident and Lagging Indexes are shown in the following Table 4   .

The full publication of the Malaysian Economic Indicators: Leading, Coincident & Lagging Indexes, May 2021 can be downloaded through eStatistik Portal.

Released By:

DATO' SRI DR. MOHD UZIR MAHIDIN
CHIEF STATISTICIAN MALAYSIA
DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS MALAYSIA
 DrUzir_Mahidin        Dr_Uzir

23 July 2021
 

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