Business / AI-assisted brief

Central Bank researchers propose new weekly business index for Malta

A working paper proposes a weekly indicator using 28 economic series and finds it tracks Malta’s business cycle with smaller historical revisions than the Bank’s current monthly index.

By Malta News AI Desk / 25/09/2026

Central Bank of Malta researchers have developed a proposed weekly indicator intended to give a more detailed and stable view of business conditions in the Maltese economy. The working paper, published on Friday, 25 September, constructs the series from January 2001 onwards.

The paper by Laura Bigeni and Germano Ruisi combines weekly, monthly and quarterly information in a mixed-frequency dynamic factor model. Its dataset contains 28 series covering real activity, expectations, financial conditions and international trade.

Unlike the Bank’s existing Business Conditions Index, which is estimated monthly, the proposed index incorporates weekly information and can show how groups of indicators contribute to changes in the overall reading. The researchers identify real activity as the largest contributor, followed by expectations about future economic activity.

The paper says the new and current indices give a broadly similar account of Malta’s economic fluctuations and both move broadly in line with changes in real gross domestic product. Within the proposed model, real GDP and real services turnover are the main drivers in the real-activity group, while the Economic Sentiment Indicator is important within the expectations group.

A comparison across successive data vintages found that the proposed index changed less when new information and revised data were added. The researchers therefore describe it as less susceptible to revisions of its historical values than the current index.

The publication is a research paper, not an announcement that the Central Bank has adopted or replaced its existing public index. It states that the views are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank.

Read the official source: Central Bank of Malta working paper