In a report released today, Chief Statistician Mohd Uzir Mahidin said the annual change of the Leading Index (LI) showed an improvement to negative 0.7% in October 2018 from negative 1.7% in September 2018.

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% 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%),” he said.

Meanwhile, the Coincident Index (CI), which examines the current economic activity, rose 1% in the reference month.

Two components that contributed significantly to the increase were Volume Index of Retail Trade (0.5%) and Real Contributions to EPF (0.2%), he said, adding that the annual change of CI grew further to 3.9% in October 2018 as against 3.4% in the previous month.