USING the best available data to project the high income threshold, Pemandu says the National Transformation Programme has moved Malaysia in the right direction.
 
“Since the economies around the world have not grown at rates they enjoyed in the past, consequentially the World Bank Atlas threshold has not grown in tandem with the projection in the lab.
 
“However, data from the World Bank shows very clearly that the gap between Malaysia and the high income nation threshold has progressively narrowed from 33% in 2010 to 15% in 2015,” wrote Pemandu Associates executive vice-president Alex Iskandar Liew today.
 
Liew was responding to a column published on The Malaysian Insight on April 24. His six-page reply was emailed to The Malaysian Insight.
 
In his column, Osman Jailani said Pemandu had failed in its objectives as Malaysia’s gross national income per capita was spiralling downwards instead of increasing.

“Data from Bank Negara shows that our GNI per capita had fallen by 15% from US$10,345 in 2013 to US$8,821 in 2016. This is far from the US$15,000 that Pemandu benchmarked to be a high-income economy,” wrote Osman. – May 2, 2017.