By Karen Bong
KUCHING, Feb 19: Chief Minister Datuk Patinggi Abang Johari Tun Openg sees that the Covid-19 outbreak will have a minimal impact on the Sarawak economy as the industries here were not dominated by service sectors.
He pointed out that Sarawak’s economic regime was quite different from the federal regime which has a large services sector that can be sensitive to external shock.
“But for us, our service sector is there but not as big as that of Peninsula Malaysia. We have injected substantial sum into our infrastructure development and therefore our growth is still (projected) to be between 5 to 6 per cent.
“The Covid-19 outbreak affects us a bit because our economy is structured in such a way that we are not depending too much on services.
“So the business is still there, while billions of ringgit have been put into infrastructure,” he told reporters after launching the Sarawak Travel App and Web Portal here today.
He stated this in responding to a question whether the Sarawak government saw the need to come up with a stimulus package which the federal government was planning to cushion the economic impact of Covid-19 and help industries rebound when the outbreak is contained.
Abang Johari noted that the stimulus package was intended to stimulate the Malaysia economy which saw ‘soft’ growth in the last quarter with only 3.6 per cent.
“With the slow growth and coupled with the impact of Covid-19 now, it can come down further. I think that is the situation,” he explained.
Noting that the services sector including tourism would be hit badly by Covid-19, he however said that Sarawak would not be badly affected as the tourism industry did not rely heavily on Chinese visitors.
“Sarawak tourism sector’s contribution to the GDP was not that huge yet. More importantly, we don’t rely only on Chinese market so that’s why we are not very much affected,” he said.
Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture Datuk Abdul Karim Rahman Hamzah, Minister of Local Government and Housing Datuk Seri Dr Sim Kui Hian, State Legislative Assembly (DUN) Speaker Datuk Amar Mohamad Asfia Awang Nassar, Minister of Transport Datuk Lee Kim Shin and Assistant Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture Datuk Sebastian Ting were present.—DayakDaily
