PEMANDU Associates chief executive officer Idris Jala is optimistic that Malaysia’s Gross National Income (GNI) will improve despite the current economy and the country is on track to become a high-income nation by 2020.

“Unfortunately, what has happened, is the world is going through an economic slowdown for the last two successive years and the World Bank has reduced the GNI per capita.

“I expected it to go down, because many countries in the world dropped their actual GNI.

“In the case of Malaysia, we have achieved tremendous progress, but unfortunately because of the weakening ringgit, relative to the US dollar, that has dropped our conversion rate,” he said after the launch of a new World Bank report titled “Driving Performance from the center: Malaysia’s Experience with Pemandu”.

Idris said that Malaysia would have achieved a high-income status in 2015 if it not for the weakening ringgit.

“We would have achieve that target if the ringgit had stayed at RM3.20 against the US dollar which was in 2010.”

“But, the crux of it is that we are focussing on our activities and as far as we are concerned, the road ahead is still going to be challenging, but we are still confident we are able to succeed in what we have set out to do.”

Idris said that Malaysia’s trade suffered due to a weaker global economy but a 24% rebound in the first quarter of 2017 shows the country’s economic resilience.

He said that every year the World Bank sets what’s called a threshold for high-income economy and this is termed as gross national income per capita.

“Every year they put a new number, but they don’t have a number for the year 2020. So there is no GNI per capita that the World Bank has set for 2020.

On April 24, the performance delivery unit came under fire when Osman Jailani, a reader of The Malaysian Insight, pointed out that Malaysia’s GNI per capita had fallen from US$10,345 in 2013 to US$8,821 in 2016.

Pemandu’s Shahrizan Syawal replied Osman’s letter but he came under attack by other readers who found his reply to be condescending. – May 9, 2017.