Cost of living increased highest during Perikatan Nasional’s era

Cost of living increased highest during Perikatan Nasional’s era

IN a recent article, Perikatan Nasional (PN) chairman Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin claimed that the cost of living in Malaysia has gone up significantly since Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim helmed the unity government.

In fact, Muhyiddin should be the last person who can claim that he contributed towards reducing the cost of living in the 34 months when PN formed the government following the Sheraton move and was subsequently succeeded by the Barisan Nasional administration under Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob.

A quick check on the consumer price index (CPI) in the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) website shows the following figures that are tabulated for the convenience of our comparison between the few eras.

Four periods are looked at, beginning with former prime minister (PM) Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak tenure from April 2009 to May 2018.

However, because the DOSM website only provided the Consumer Price Index (CPI) from January 2010, the calculation of the number of months for Najib’s era runs from January 2010 to May 2018.

ChatGPT calculated the number of months for each period while all the other calculations are done using Microsoft Excel sheet.

The CPI for the months are obtained by moving the cursor across the months covering the period between January 2010 and May 2023 (141 months) where the CPI rose from 99.4 to 130.2.

The average rate of increase in CPI over this entire period of 154 months is 0.2 notch per month.

What we should be interested in is not only the rise in CPI but the gradient or rate of increase over the time period, and it is this chart that shows PN’s track record was 0.24 – the highest thus far – followed by Najib’s era (0.21).

There was a decrease in CPI by 0.01 per month during Pakatan Harapan’s (PH) era from May 2018 to March 2020 mainly due to the movement control order (MCO) where the economy literally came to a standstill.

The unity government showed an increase of 0.14 in CPI over seven months whereas its overall CPI has declined from November 2022 at 4.0% to 2.8% in May 2023.

The overall CPI is computed from the Food & Non-Alcoholic Beverages; Alcoholic Beverages & Tobacco; Clothing & Footwear; Housing, Water, Electricity, Gas & Other Fuels; Furnishings, Household Equipment & Routing Household Maintenance; Health; Transport; Communication; Recreation Services & Culture; Education; Restaurant & Hotels; and Miscellaneous Goods & Services.

Muhyiddin may want to take note that the steepest gradient at the rate of monthly CPI increase of 0.24 was during his and Ismail Sabri’s era. This marked the beginning of a surge in the cost of living.

Had Muhyiddin or Ismail Sabri taken the steps to control the cost of living, things would have improved by now. – July 12, 2023.