In a statement today, Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng said the government is also boosting employment opportunities and incomes of youth, fresh graduates and women through the five-year RM6.5 billion Malaysia@Work programme.
At the same time, it is implementing major infrastructure projects valued at RM120 billion.
Lim said other infrastructure works to support the economy include the building of Bandar Malaysia with a gross development value of RM140 billion, and the RM450 million allocation to distribute a one-off RM30 e-wallet credit to eligible Malaysians to encourage the use of cashless payments.
The manufacturing PMI rose 0.5 point to 50.0 points in December, the highest in 15 months. It came after the November PMI improved to 49.5 points from 49.3 points a month earlier.
Lim said the PMI manufacturing improvement suggests the domestic economy would grow faster in the coming months.
“The PMI is not the only indicator pointing towards a more sustained future expansion. The Statistics Department showed that the latest leading economic indicators expanded 1.4% to 120.3 points in October 2019 versus 118.6 points in the previous month.
“This is a significant improvement from the -0.4% and 0.3% change in August and September, respectively,” he said.
He said trends exhibited by the RAM Business Confidence Index published this week concur with the outlook implied by the PMI and Statistics Department data.
Rating agency RAM suggests that sentiment among Malaysian businesses is improving, with confidence among corporates rising 3.2 points to 56.4 in the first to second quarters of this year, relative to the period from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the first quarter of 2020.
At the same time, confidence among small and medium enterprises rose 1.0 point to 54.2, which is the highest level since the index began in 2017, he said.
“These findings are in line with the government’s optimistic view regarding 2020 growth prospects, which expects the gross domestic product (GDP) to grow robustly at 4.7% in 2019, before accelerating to 4.8% this year.
“For the first three quarters of 2019, the Malaysian GDP has expanded by 4.6% year-on-year,” he said.