Malaysia’s economic growth is expected to continue its momentum to between August to October 2017.

In a statement today, the Department of Statistics Malaysia said this is supported by the annual change of Leading Index (LI) and Coincident Index (CI) which remained favourable in April 2017.

“The annual change of LI, which monitors the economic performance in advance, increased 1.4 per cent in April ,” it said.

However, the department noted that the month-to-month change of LI registered a decrease of 1.3 per cent to 117.3 points in the reference month, from 118.8 points previously.

“The main components which caused the decrease were real imports of other basic precious and other non-ferrous metal (-0.6 per cent), number of housing units approved (-0.6 per cent) and number of new companies registered (-0.4 per cent),” it said.

Meanwhile, the annual change of CI, which measures current economic activity, continued to increase to 3.8 per cent in April as against 2.9 per cent in the previous month.

On the contrary, the month-to-month change of CI showed a decrease of 0.2 per cent in the reference month, due to the decrease in retail trade volume index (-0.5 per cent) and industrial production index (-0.1 per cent) . – BERNAMA