The Malaysian Business Cycle: Forecast Performance of Economic Indices

The Busines Cycle is important to help government as well as private sectors to make timely and accurage decisions and policies. This also applicable in Malaysia. There are always questions about What is the Malaysian Business Cycle? How the Malayisan economies related to the economic varaibles? Which variables are suitable to forecast the business cycle? How to use the information available to forecast the economy? These questions will be addressed by this book. The Malaysian Business Cycle is a study of the business cycle stylized facts, characteristics, co-movement and causality in the Real Gross Domestic Products of Malaysia. This book presents the forecast performance of two economic indices namely, Diffusion Index and the Composite Leading Indicator. The Diffusion Index was developed by the authur by using 17 economic variables of Malaysia. The Composite Leading Indicator was developed by Bank Negara Malaysia. The forecast performance of the two indices is compared and benchmarked with the Autoregressive- Integrated-Moving-Average (ARIMA) model of Real GDP.