Hard to say whether we’re seeing incipient signs of recovery, but yesterday’s report from Matrade shows that Malaysia’s external trade has levelled out (log annual and monthly changes; seasonally adjusted):
After two straight months of declines, both exports and imports swung up…slightly. After all the disruptions to trade through the first half of the year, though, any positive signs are welcome.
Having said that, there’s a lot of heterogeneity in this nascent recovery. It’s clear that electronics exports are disproportionately suffering (log annual and monthly changes; seasonally adjusted):
That’s a full year of declines in E&E export growth. As a result, the share of E&E exports has plummeted down to a little over a third of total exports:
By comparison, E&E exports comprised an average of 60% of exports in 2000. As Malaysia gets slowly weaned off low-wage manufacturing, we’ll probably see this ratio drop even further – not a bad thing, if only for the sake of local wage prospects.
The July numbers are forecast to look better, but mainly because July’s numbers are seasonally higher than June’s:
Seasonally adjusted model
Point forecast:RM57,873m, Range forecast:RM65,144m-50,602m
Seasonal difference model
Point forecast:RM60,337m, Range forecast:RM68,910m-51,764m
Technical Notes:
June 2011 External Trade Report from MATRADE.
Posts
could it be that Malaysian economic sector will receive direct impact due to America economic recession??? so how we gonna survive then???
ReplyDeleteI doubt we'll see a another recession in the US. In any case, Malaysia's fortunes are now more closely tied to China.
ReplyDelete