- Funding for social protection must navigate the trade-offs in balancing the multiple objectives of fiscal policy. Malaysia’s social protection spending has been moderating since the 2010s and is lower when benchmarked against several other countries. - Within social protection spending itself, there are trade-offs between programmes. Resources had been spread thinly across many small programmes, raising the probability of fragmentation and diseconomies of scale while issues of breath and depth of coverage remain. - Fiscal space and sustainability are key considerations in social protection spending. While we are fast approaching the limits of our fiscal rules, there is room to relax these rules and improve progressivity in our tax regime to expand fiscal space for social protection.
