No country in Asia has been spared from the upheaval involving the price of rice. Even India, the world’s biggest producer and exporter of rice, is facing a tumult from the rise in the price of the staple food for most Asians.

Alternative Views: Rice security cannot be left in the hands of private enterprise

Last year, we spent RM67.4 billion on subsidies and social assistance, RM40 billion more than we did in 2021. It was a record amount. At the same time, funding made available to upgrade our roads, ports, hospitals, rural clinics, public universities, schools, housing and other necessary infrastructure needed to help Malaysia become a prosperous nation amounted to RM32.7 billion, or roughly half of the total subsidies and social assistance.

MySay: Are subsidies the best way to spend our precious tax ringgit?

From smart sensors to autonomous vehicles, industrial organisations today have access to a range of new technologies that hold immense potential for improved productivity and efficiency.

Redefining security: Protecting Malaysia's industrial evolution

It has been 60 years since the formation of Malaysia, and while the country is on track to achieve high-income economy status by as early as 2025 by some estimates, Sabah has been flagged in a 2022 World Bank report as a lagging state, most pronouncedly in socioeconomic development. It is almost ...

My Say: It’s time for Sabah to leapfrog

The boom led by artificial intelligence (AI) created a buzz in 2023 with the Magnificent Seven stocks (Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Tesla) accounting for 80% of the growth in the S&P 500 year to date. Jointly, these stocks have a market valuation of over US$11 ...

Condivergence: Is the tech rally sustainable?

The poorest countries are in desperate straits and the rest of the world is looking the other way. Doing so comes easy because low-income countries (LICs) matter little to the fate of the world in the near term. At the end of June, the combined GDP of the 28 countries in this group was roughly US...

The New Global Economy: A tragedy is unfolding in the poorest countries

Digital technology has helped energise Malaysia’s business ecosystem in recent years. The traditional levers of success are changing as innovative digital technologies unlock new paths to growth.

Competitive levers are shifting from the physical to the digital, making tech innovation th...

Growing Champions: Harnessing the power of technology to energise the nation’s businesses

A sustainable Malaysia is well underway with a bold aspiration to lead the region in energy transition and become Asean’s clean energy hub. Determined to realise this, last month the government launched part two of the National Energy Transition Roadmap (NETR), which outlines plans to achieve net...

My Say: How Malaysia’s energy transition can attract investment and inspire consumer confidence

The European Union (EU) has always been a member of the G20 — formed to be more representative of the world economy — since its summit in November 2008. Already a member of the increasingly less representative but hitherto full-of-swagger G7 and G8, the EU just walked in as a G20 member, as grand...

CARI Asean: G20: EU, now African Union, why not Asean?

The commodity boom early this century was mainly driven by mineral prices. Yet, mining’s contribution to developing countries’ revenue has been modest, largely due to massive tax evasion and avoidance.

Less mining royalties

Decades of well-supervised mineral extraction prove...

My Say: Enhancing mining revenue

Being an oil-producing country, Malaysia should, on paper, benefit from the rising price of Brent crude. But in reality, that is not the case.

While the government stands to get more dividends from Petronas Nasional Bhd, it has to bear a higher subsidy bill as it has to artificially kee...

Alternative Views: Why there is no buzz as oil approaches US$100

When I began covering the oil and gas industry in the mid-1980s and was trying to make it one of my beats — an area in which I could specialise — the term “peak oil” was one that I would come across and had to understand.

Peak oil is a theory based on a bell curve projection in 1956 by ...

My Say: Still too early to say that peak oil is near

Civil servant Encik Labu and Captain Labi meet up for breakfast at a mamak restaurant. Their conversation centres around grub, lavatories and broomsticks.

Coffee Break: And the ‘Oscar’ goes to…

Handal Energy Bhd has been without a substantial shareholder since Aug 9. The company has seen boardroom changes, however, and proposed a placement that would result in its existing shareholding rising 40% and the issuance of warrants.

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