Najib is wrong, the worst is yet to come
Anwar Ibrahim, Free Malaysia Today
The latest declaration by the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak that “the worst is over” when the country’s GDP grew at 4.5 percent in the last quarter of 2009 is not only premature but irresponsible.
It is clear that the supposedly stronger growth was due to the massive pump priming by the government over the last year. Propping up the sagging economy is at best a stop gap measure.
Pump priming by definition cannot be permanent. I am deeply concerned that the continuous reliance on massive spending will take us down the road to economic serfdom. And that may not be too distant in the future.
Since 1998, the Barisan Nasional government has implemented only one economic policy i.e. increasing public expenditure (most of the time unnecessarily through massive projects that were subjected to leakages and inflated costs) to make up for the dramatic decrease in private spending.
The data on private investment trending since 1991 should serve as a reminder of the path to economic damnation that BN has dragged us into. While private investments grew at the compound annual growth rate of 16.2 percent between 1991 and 1997, this has dropped severely to a marginal growth of 1 percent between 1998 and 2008.
