COMMENT | 12th Malaysia Plan: Time for dynamic growth

COMMENT | I appreciate the gesture by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Mustapa Mohamed for briefing Senate president Rais Yatim and bipartisan senators on the framework of the 12th Malaysia Plan on Dec 22.

I would also like to acknowledge Economic Planning Unit (EPU) director-general Saiful Anuar Lebai Hussen for being genuinely interested in feedback. The plan would be presented to Parliament in March 2021.

Mustapa promised senators that he and Finance Minister Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz would come to Parliament to brief MPs and senators on the state of the economy as frequently as on a monthly basis starting from 2021.

I would like the government to consider going one step further to formalise these sessions through House and senate committees or joint House-senate committees, which have not been attempted in our parliamentary history.

Some forms of a well-staffed Parliamentary Budget Office would be a great change for the better to prepare MPs and senators for more meaningful economic debates.

The idea of a Parliamentary Budget Office was proposed during a cabinet special committee on anti-corruption meeting in January 2019 chaired by then prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

I told Mustapa that I hope I am wrong to feel that the 12th Malaysia Plan in its current form is taking a linear approach to conceive economic development. Instead, we need a dynamic approach to ensure that we organise ourselves to rise, lest we be doomed as others rise further and overtake us.

To illustrate, if the average growth rates of the last twenty years in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita for Malaysia and Singapore stayed constant, it would take us...