{"id":1226,"date":"2026-01-20T17:42:39","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T17:42:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/wptest\/2026\/01\/20\/budget-2018-a-caring-budget\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T18:03:58","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T18:03:58","slug":"budget-2018-a-caring-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/portal\/2026\/01\/20\/budget-2018-a-caring-budget\/","title":{"rendered":"Budget 2018 \u2013 A Caring Budget"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Budget 2018 reflects the Government\u2019s sensitivity towards the Rakyat, through caring yet practical policies, particularly for the B40 and M40.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Tengku Datuk Seri Zafrul Aziz, Group Chief Executive, CIMB Group notes that focus on bread-and-butter issues, like reducing income tax for the lower income group, increasing assistance for basic food and transportation items and providing more allocation for affordable homes will go a long way towards ensuring the Rakyat\u2019s short- and long-term interests.<\/p>\n<p>The focus on building more than 385,000 affordable homes shows that the Government is taking firm steps to address head-on the challenge of home ownership for the lower-income group. Extending PR1MA\u2019s step-up financing scheme to private housing developers is also a laudable move towards facilitating home-ownership.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOn enabling further a digital economy, the Digital Free Trade Zone that is already taking shape will make Malaysia a major fulfilment gateway and commercial hub for ASEAN, providing opportunities to the nation\u2019s economic backbone, the SMEs, and more jobs. Related to this, CIMB Group, as a leading universal bank with a strong footprint in ASEAN, is ever ready to facilitate SMEs\u2019 cross-border trade and business expansion regionally.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The policies on GLC\u2019s operations, particularly in ensuring the well-being of staff reflect a people-focused vision by the government. Indeed, quite a few of them, like flexi-work arrangements and childcare centres at work, have already been implemented by CIMB.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOn the whole, this appears to be a carefully crafted budget, addressing the Rakyat\u2019s immediate concerns, and yet forward-looking enough to ensure the nation\u2019s future economic, social and spiritual development.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Budget 2018 reflects the Government\u2019s sensitivity towards the Rakyat, through caring yet practical policies, particularly for the B40 and M40.\u00a0 Tengku Datuk Seri Zafrul Aziz, Group Chief Executive, CIMB Group notes that focus on bread-and-butter issues, like reducing income tax for the lower income group, increasing assistance for basic food and transportation items and providing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5115,"href":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions\/5115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malaysian-business.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}