  In Minkowski spacetime it is well-known that the canonical energy-momentum
current is involved in the construction of the globally conserved currents of
energy-momentum and total angular momentum. For the construction of conserved
currents corresponding to (approximate) scale and proper conformal symmetries,
however, an improved energy-momentum current is needed. By extending the
Minkowskian framework to a genuine metric-affine spacetime, we find that the
affine Noether identities and the conformal Killing equations enforce this
improvement in a rather natural way. So far, no gravitational dynamics is
involved in our construction. The resulting dilation and proper conformal
currents are conserved provided the trace of the energy-momentum current
satisfies a (mild) scaling relation or even vanishes.
