KUALA LUMPUR: The World Bank expects Malaysia’s Budget 2017 to continue to promote economic growth, noting that the country has in past years been able to present a budget that is adaptable to the macroeconomic situation.

“If you look at Malaysia’s story, over the past many years, it has been a positive growth storyline,” said the bank’s Malaysia country manager Faris Hadad-Zervos.

“And Malaysia continues to grow in a period when there are a lot of headwinds, and it continues to focus on rationalising the budget, on revising the budget to needs — the needs of Malaysia in terms of growth, in terms of service delivery,” he said.

Hadad-Zervos said the Malaysian economy will continue to grow despite softer economic conditions elsewhere in the region.

“Looking at the region, Malaysia’s growth pattern, whether down a few basis points or up, [it’s] still above-average,” he told reporters yesterday at a workshop that promoted business opportunities and awareness of World Bank-financed projects.

The Malaysian economy grew by 4% in the second quarter of 2016 (2Q16), after rising 4.2% in 1Q16 and 4.9% in 2Q15. For 2016 as a whole, Bank Negara Malaysia has forecast a 4% to 4.5% growth.

At the workshop, Hadad-Zervos called for more Malaysian private-sector involvement in projects that the World Bank finances abroad.

“The workshop focused on how private Malaysian firms can work with the World Bank through the bank’s financing development for projects in developing countries, and on the products and advisory services offered by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (Miga),” he said.

The IFC is involved in financing investment, mobilising capital in international financial markets and providing advisory services to businesses and governments, while Miga provides guarantees to private-sector investors and lenders.

“We have different parts in the World Bank Group and one of them is the IFC which is the private-sector arm, in which they invest in private-sector entities. There has been a lot of Malaysian content in there; a lot of Malaysian companies have been investing with the IFC in other countries,” he said.