Our per capita income was then at RM17,600 (2004) per annum compared to RM37,800 in 2016. And yet, our rating remains the 3/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  same at ‘A-‘. Rating agencies assess sovereign credit risks based on a long term outlook and at most times are reactionary to certain events. This may result in the credit ratings falling behind the curve and not incorporating the latest market developments. For example, Indonesia was only recently upgraded to investment grade by S&P, more than 5 years after Moody’s and Fitch’s gave a similar rating. Market-implied ratings may be a better gauge of a country’s latest credit profile and is already widely used by the market. In the past 3 years, based on bond market yields, Malaysia’s marketimplied rating has at times reached levels that indicate a better rating than that assigned by the rating agencies. Throughout the first half of this year alone, yields for the 10-year Malaysian government securities have swiftly recovered to 3.9% from a peak of 4.5% last November, post-US elections, reflecting higher confidence in the Malaysian bond market. We are currently the largest bond market in ASEAN in terms of percentage over GDP. The Malaysian bond market continues to be resilient and well-functioning. Non-resident holdings of Malaysian bonds have settled at a lower level of 26% compared to its peak of 34.7%.
In this connection, it is worth offering some figures illustrating the scale of this change. Specifically, the Spanish economy’s current account balance has improved by more than 11 percentage points (pp) of GDP since the start of the crisis, turning from a deficit of 9.4% of GDP in 2007 to a surplus of around 2% in 2019. In terms of components, while all captions have contributed positively to this adjustment, of most note has been the correction of the net balance of non-energy goods and of the primary and secondary income balance. The contributions of the latter to the improvement in the total balance in this period were almost 6 pp and 3 pp, respectively. But the energy goods, tourism and non-tourist services balances have also each contributed about 1 pp. As suggested, among the key factors behind this correction of the external balance are the gains in competitiveness achieved in these past ten years. These are estimated to have contributed both to the increase in the structural level of exports and to their geographical diversification towards markets with greater growth potential, thereby resulting in a favourable market-share performance. At the same time, imports have been seen to be flatter in relation to the rise in final demand, despite the momentum of exports in firms and sectors with a high import content. That likewise points to an improvement in the competitiveness of the resident productive sector compared with foreign competitors.