Purpose The private rental market in Malta has expanded significantly in recent years, but as at 2020, no official rent index is yet published. This paper aims to construct such an index and explores the relative importance of structural, locational and neighbourhood factors to advertised rents. Design/methodology/approach The authors compile hedonic indices for advertised rents in Malta collected from publicly available sources using webscraping techniques. The database comprises more than 25,000 listings with information on various property attributes. Hedonic regressions are estimated using ordinary least squares and rent indices are computed using three alternative methods: the time dummy method, the rolling time dummy method and the average characteristics method. For the latter, indices are computed using the Laspeyres, Paasche and Fisher methods. Findings The results from the hedonic indices indicate that the annual growth rate in advertised rents was slowing down during 2019, albeit still remaining relatively high, while in 2020, advertised rents contracted sharply, amplified by the effects of COVID-19. The findings also reveal that advertised rental prices are significantly influenced by various structural, locational and neighbourhood factors. Originality/value This paper introduces the first rent index in Malta that will be used to monitor developments in the rental segment of the housing market and for financial stability purposes given the share of buy-to-let properties. It also provides various elasticities on the impact of property attributes on advertised rents in Malta. Finally, the study contributes to the literature on the effect of foreign-born residents on advertised rents.

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After the European sovereign debt crisis in 2012, inflation has been unexpectedly low across most of the economies making up the euro area, as well as the Monetary Union aggregate, with economists referring to this phenomenon as the “missing inflation” puzzle. As the smallest and one of the most open economies in the euro area, Malta has also registered a period of low inflation post-2012, despite registering an average GDP growth rate of 6.9% per annum over the period 2013-2019. This paper estimates the extent of inflation persistence of Malta and a number of EU economies for both the pre- and post-2012 period. Measures of persistence are computed as the sum of autoregressive coefficients derived from univariate regressions on both aggregated and disaggregated inflation series. Estimates of persistence in Malta have increased when the sample covers the post-2012 period. In terms of the main sub-components, energy inflation has a substantially higher persistence compared to the pre-2012 period, reflecting both external and country-specific factors. Most other EU countries also reported an increase in persistence when including the post-2012 period in the sample although the estimates for Malta, both at the aggregate and disaggregated indices, remain less persistent.