KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysia’s economic growth is expected to moderate to 3.9 per cent in 2023 from an earlier projection of 4.3 per cent in April this year amid a substantial deceleration of external demand, according to the World Bank today.
However, it said, domestic demand would continue to support Malaysia's economic resilience this year while a limited fiscal space remained a key challenge for the economy.
"Growth for this year is actually 0.4 percentage point lower than our previous forecast and the reason for this comes to no surprise -- lower global growth this year, weak external demand.
"We can see that for Malaysia’s exports numbers, which contracted by 3.3 per cent (in the first quarter) and 9.4 per cent (in the second quarter) of this year,” World Bank lead economist Apurva Sanghi told reporters at the release of the October 2023 East Asia and Pacific (EAP) Economic Update and part one of the September 2023 Malaysia Economic Monitor (MEM) here today.