KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia's economy is expected to continue to move forward in the second quarter, Chief Statistician Abdul Rahman Hassan of the country's Statistics Department, in comments published by the Bernama news agency. He said the government's Economic Transformation Program and Government Transformation Program are expected to continue to be the “main drivers” of the domestic economy. “In the first quarter, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew 4.7 percent compared to the the same quarter last year,” he told reporters after opening a seminar on the importance of business organizations responding to economic surveys. He added that the services sector is expected to remain the biggest contributor to the country's GDP, followed by the manufacturing sector. In the first quarter of this year, “the services and manufacturing sectors contributed 54.2 percent and about 20 per cent respectively to GDP,” he said in delivering the information. Last year, the country's GDP grew 5.1 percent to RM881 billion with the main contributors being the services, manufacturing, mining and quarrying, and construction sectors. The seminar, organized by the Federal Territory Statistics Department, is aimed at raising awareness among business organizations of the importance of responding to economic surveys, so as to enable the compilation of accurate and reliable data to support the nation's economic growth.
