Thus, having fallen for a period, product prices for industrial goods also began to rise towards the end of 2003 although the rate of increase stopped at 1 per cent in 2004. Since the latter half of the 1990s labour costs per hour in the Swedish manufacturing sector have risen at a somewhat diminishing rate. Coupled with high productivity growth, this has resulted in sharply falling unit labour costs (Chart 6). That contributed to a slight rise on average in profit margins in the manufacturing sector last year as well, despite the fact that the increase in intermediate goods prices did not completely pass through to product prices. BIS Review 25/2005  3  Stiffer competition, partly due to low prices of imported goods, increased import penetration, i.e. a higher share of imported goods in total consumption, and new foreign players in the Swedish market may have contributed to the high productivity growth and the low producer price inflation for domestically produced goods. Producer prices for imported goods Import prices for consumer goods have fallen since the end of 2002 (Chart 4). Import prices in Swedish kronor are determined by the price developments and price level in the countries from which we import, how large a share we import from each country and developments in the exchange rate. The krona has strengthened more or less continuously from its weak level at the end of 2001, and this of course has contributed to the fall in import prices in recent years (Chart 7).

The marketplace has now been liberalised to allow for multilateral financial institutions, multinational and national corporations from other jurisdictions to issue both ringgit and nonringgit denominated sukuk in our sukuk market with increasing foreign investor participation in such issuances The sukuk market in Malaysia has seen wide ranging innovative structures and a greater diversity in the type and maturity of the sukuk. A landmark issuance is the $ million exchangeable sukuk Musyarakah in 2006 by Khazanah, the government’s investment corporation for the purpose of selling a stake in Telekom Malaysia. It marked the first issuance of its kind, incorporating full convertibility features common to conventional equitylinked transactions. A further notable issuance was the pioneering retail exchange-traded sukuk to raise funds for a transportation project that allowed retail investors the opportunity to have direct access to the sukuk and thus a stake in a massive infrastructure development in the country, therefore broadening the range of low-risk investment products available to such investors. In terms of maturity, the ringgit sukuk market has seen issuances of maturities to 30 years which were well received by the financial market. Regular sukuk issuances with different maturities by the Malaysian government has also created a benchmark yield curve for market reference, of which is complimented by the establishment of a number of indices for non-ringgit and ringgit denominated sukuk that serve as benchmarks to track the performance of sukuk. These initiatives have progressively contributed towards creating a vibrant secondary sukuk market in Malaysia, with increased depth and liquidity.