A provisional surplus of €488.3 million was recorded for Malta’s external transactions between July and September 2018, statistics published by the National Statistics Office found.
The figure is a €60.5 million increase on the surplus registered for the same quarter in 2017, which stood at €427.8 million, the NSO indicated.
The main source of this surplus, the NSO said, is a positive net balance of the services account, which amounts to €1,230 million, marked by improvements in the net balances of other services, travel and transport accounts.
This was partially outweighed however by negative net balance in the goods account (€410.7 million), primary income account (€300.5 million) and secondary income account (€30.5 million), the NSO said.
During the third quarter of this year, the capital account registered a positive net balance of €18.8 million as compared to a positive balance of €16.1 million during the same quarter in 2017. The financial account was shaped by net asset increases of €191.3 million, an increase in net balance of assets of €25.4 million over the same quarter last year.
The development in the financial account balance was mainly the result of higher other investment and portfolio investment by €1,842.7 million and €640.4 million respectively. These were partially outweighed by lower direct investment assets by €2,360.5 million.
As a direct effect of the above shifts in the statement, the reserve assets of the country decreased by €5.3 million compared to an increase of €40.5 million during the comparable quarter in 2017.
1.4% inflation in Malta last November
Malta’s annual inflation rate stood at 1.4% in November, below the average annual inflation rate for the EU (2%) and the Euro area (1.9%), statistics published by the EU’s statistic body Eurostat indicated.
Malta’s rate is lower than what the country experienced over the past months, wherein the annual inflation rate between June and October was consistently higher than 2%. Meanwhile, it is also a marginal 0.1% decrease on the annual inflation rate Malta had in November 2017.
The lowest annual rates were registered in Denmark (0.7%), Ireland (0.8%) and Portugal (0.9%). The highest annual rates were recorded in Estonia, Hungary and Romania (all 3.2%). Compared with October 2018, annual inflation fell in twenty-five Member States, remained stable in one (Denmark) and rose in one (Portugal, from 0.8% to 0.9%).