Lim (left) delivers his speech during the tabling of Budget 2019 at the Dewan Rakyat earlier today. – Bernama photo
KUALA LUMPUR: Budget 2019, the first budget presented by the Pakatan Harapan government, allocates a total of RM314.5 billion compared to RM290.4 allocated by the previous government for 2018.
Tabling Budget 2019 in the Dewan Rakyat today, Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng said RM259.8 billion is for operating expenditure and RM54.7 billion for development expenditure.
“This allocation does not include contingency savings amounting to RM2 billion,” he said in presenting his maiden budget.
Under the development expenditure, the economic sector receives the highest portion of RM29.2 billion, covering transportation, trade, industry, energy, public amenities and agriculture.
The social sector receives a sum of RM15.2 billion, while the security sector gets RM7.1 billion and general administrative sector, RM3.2 billion.
Lim said the development expenditure has indeed seen an increase from RM44.9 billion in 2017 to RM54.9 billion and RM54.7 billion in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
“The main reason that contributes to the increase is the reclassification of what was categorised as operating allocation to development allocation amounting to RM6.9 billion in 2018 and RM9.7 billion in 2019,” he said.
He said an example of the reclassification exercise was the allocation given to Prasarana for the implementation of the Light Rail Transit (LRT) project and the allocation for Suria Strategic Energy Resources for gas pipeline projects.
Prior to this, he said those allocations were labelled as operating expenditure despite the fact that they were actually development expenditure.
“Other similar expenditures are the rental and maintenance payments for the Royal Malaysia Police buildings and renovation of schools,” he said. — Bernama