I REFER to your recent article titled “Latest World Bank report bad news for BN” where the author was cited as “Athena Athena is a reader of The Malaysian Insight”.

While I respect the decision of The Malaysian Insight to allow your readers to voice their opinion,  I believe greater care and scrutiny should be taken to avoid obvious, misleading politically-motivated propaganda to be published.

From the very first sentence, the article is already wrong. The link to the World Bank report given in the article, which is supplied here, goes to a report that says nothing negative about Malaysia. 

In fact, the only mention of Malaysia in that link was in “Thailand and Malaysia are expected to grow more rapidly than expected, due to the stronger exports, including tourism, for the former, and increased investment in the latter.”

How that is considered “bad news for BN” is a big mystery.

The article then mentions that the World Bank says Malaysia’s growth will slow to 5% in 2018 and 4.8% in 2019.

For upper-middle income countries which Malaysia is categorized as, 4.8% and 5% growth is considered very decent.

Take Singapore for instance, Singapore’s own Ministry of Trade and Industry forecast its economy to grow between 2% and 4% until the year 2020, while the Asian Development Bank had forecasted the Singaporean economy to to grow at 2.7% in 2018.

It was only last week that the World Bank held a media briefing where it was announced that it has upgraded Malaysia’s growth forecast for the second time this year.

Last year, the World Bank had forecast Malaysia to grow only 4.3% in 2017. It raised the growth to 4.9% in June and then raised it again to 5.2% last week.

In that media briefing, World Bank Group lead economist Richard Record had much praise for Malaysia’s economy and concluded: “Moving forward, the outlook remains positive as the Malaysian economy continues to experience broad-based growth across a range of diversified sectors. Domestic demand is expected to remain the primary anchor of growth, underpinned by robust growth in private-sector expenditure.”

Thus it is reasonable to expect the World Bank to also raise our GDP forecast for 2018 and 2019  in the near future – given its double upgrades of us this year as well as the robust growth we are experiencing at the moment.

Even more damning is author Athena Athena’s comment that “unlike its Asian neighbours, Malaysia still has not entered either the G20 or the trillion-dollar GDP club (Barisan Nasional’s latest target is a trillion ringgit).”

This shows that “Athena Athena” has very shallow understanding of how the GDP works. 

The larger the population of a country, the bigger the total GDP of the country.

It is true that Indonesia, with its population of 261 million and almost eight and a half times bigger than Malaysia,  has a GDP close to US$1 trillion (RM4.23 trillion).

Although Thailand has a population that is more than double of Malaysia, Thailand’s GDP is nowhere near US$1 trillion yet and was at US$407 billion in 2016 compared with US$296 billion for Malaysia.

As a comparison, Singapore’s GDP in 2016 was US$297 billion – still far from US$1 trillion.

A  better measure to compare Malaysia with our neighbours would be to use GDP per capita instead of total GDP. Use of this metric will show that Malaysia’s GDP per capita is still far ahead of both Thailand and Indonesia.

Malaysia’s GDP in US dollar terms had been impacted by the weaker exchange rate but stripping out the effects of exchange rates which rises and falls, Malaysia’s GDP using the more widely-used Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms have shown very good growth since 2009.

Athena Athena’s motive for “her” letter as misleading propaganda is also betrayed by the fact that she wrote that “Malaysian youth unemployment rate has skyrocketed to 12.1%” and then gave a link to the United Nations statistic page.

Should a reader click on the link provided by her, they will notice that the global average for youth unemployment is 13.56% – showing that Malaysia is below the global average.

While the government continues with measures to solve this, youth unemployment is certainly not a problem unique to Malaysia, nor is it a new issue,  having existed since Tun Mahathir’s era.

In fact, the same link given by her will show that the average youth unemployment rate for the OECD countries is 14%, for all countries classified as high income is 15.2% while for the entire Euro area is 23.6%.

Proof that Athena Athena’s article is nothing more than opposition propaganda is when she states that “PM Najib is notorious for falsifying economic data in his speeches” and gave a link to an article written by the ex-Aide of the former PKR Selangor Menteri Besar.

Should you click on the link she gave and read it, you will find that the article says nothing about PM Najib “falsifying data” but is merely an analysis of certain statistics that Najib did not also quote in his speeches.

Let’s focus on the real performance of the Barisan Nasional government led by PM Najib.

Since 2009, the Malaysian economy has shrugged off the Great Global Recession of 2008 – the worst since the depression of the 1930s – and a 70% fall in the price of our major commodity exports and continued to grow while maintaining low jobless rates.

In the 48 years from 1963 to 2011, Malaysia’s yearly economic growth has exceeded Singapore only five times while Singapore beat us 43 times.

But since the year 2011, we have outperformed Singapore for six years straight and as the World Bank forecasts, will continue to outperform our neighbour in the next two years at least .

Five times in 48 years versus six years out of 6 (so far). You do the maths. Results do not lie.

This does not happen by accident but is a result of proper policies and tough but necessary transformation of the economy and correcting many of the past policy mistakes of the Mahathir government.

Without impacting on the freedom of the press, I urge The Malaysian Insight team to be more critical of such letters from readers in future to prevent your growing portal from being used as a platform for “fake news” or blatantly misleading propaganda.

All Malaysians should read the new World Bank report in its entirety to draw their own conclusions on whether the World Bank’s report is good news or bad news for Barisan Nasional. 

(link to: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/28396/9781464812095.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y “

It is good news with much praise from the World Bank for our economy, our policy reforms, and our future prospects.

* Eric See-To is the Barisan Nasional Strategic Communications deputy director.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.