Malaysia’s economy

The Prime Minister of Malaysia Najib claimed that GDP in Q1 2010 is 10.1% greater than the same period of last year.It seems to be very good news as it indicates Malaysia’s economy is walking out of the mess and turning into a right way.However,some people put some arguments out because they see the growth of Malaysia’ economy is based a large deficit and creating a huge amount of debts.

Malaysia government provided RM18.6billion as the subsidies to petrol price,gas price and so on.It is almost 11% of GDP for the year,higher than many other developed and developing countries in the world(France-1.4%,UK-0.7%;Indonesia-2.7%,India-1.6%,China-0.7%).However,the expenses on subsidies are actually only ranking at No.4 of total expenses.The No.1 expense is for salary and other bonus of civil servants-1.22million of civil servants cost RM52.9billion for the last year-it’s around 3 times of subsidies and 33.7% of the total expenses.That means each public servant could get average income for the year at RM43360,at the same time,the Per Capita GNI(Gross National Income) of Malaysia is RM23567(ie. Malaysia has approx. 27.7million citizens in 2009.)

From the points I can see,I suggest the government smoothly cuts down the subsidies,but also need to cut down the number of public servants by increasing the operational efficiency and applying e-solutions and automation systems in order to facilitate the administrations among different departments.

Malaysia might not be another Greece so soon,but if the government doesn’t know how to control the debts and deficit,I don’t think a better future will be close to the people in this land.On the contrary,the whole country will probably suffer the pain later.

Malaysia Budget 2010

Today ministry of Finance in Malaysia will submit the budget for the coming 2010.The Prime Minister Dato’ Najib is also the minister of Finance.I think he had to pay attention to this budget because Malaysia was just suffered by the economic downturn seriously and now difficultly walking out of it.The government ran some mini budgets during the past several month to support country’s economic by adding deficit.So the forthcoming budget is at the crossroad that may push the economic up or pull it down to the jungle.

Najib

In front of the new budget,Najib must give out the ways for two main points at the same time:

  • To keep supporting on business activities and relieving financial pressures of citizens by issuing policies that benefit both companies and consumers
  • To cut the deficit into a proper range

I will post the hot points tonight when the budget released to the public.