Home Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has urged the government to “take cognisance” of a recent statement from a UN expert that the poverty rate in the country was far lower than the official figures.<br /><br />Maintaining that the government had achieved “great success” in reducing poverty over the past few decades, he called for efforts to determine the veracity of the findings.<br /><br />“When there is a remark by someone (from) overseas [...] we want to take cognisance of what they said and we need to establish whether (what he said was) factual or was it based on just random sampling.<br /><br />“There must be certain basic principles for how to measure things like poverty. If you just select (an) area, look here and there [...] and you say ‘Oh, the whole country is facing that problem’ when there are 30 million people in Malaysia, then that is not the right way to do (things).<br /><br />“(But) I don’t want to question that,” the minister said when asked by the media after holding a Merdeka celebration at his ministry in Putrajaya on Wednesday.
