I refer to the Senior Citizen's letter Running the country as a business .

I fully agree with the writer that in running a business, one has to be mindful of its costs and benefits. As well as justifications of funding through borrowings. It may be easier to borrow money than to ensure income generated is able to repay loan interests as well as the principal amount.

However, running business from a country's perspective is an entirely different animal altogether. I seem to have left out the fact that initial spending, of say RM100,000, in a country economy's can potentially generate GDP of up to 10 times the amount (assuming the savings rate is 10%) and the rate of such money being spent back in the economy.

The main contractor of a mega-project will pay its sub-contractor, the sub-contractor pays for the labour as well as other expenses. The workers will in turn use their income to pay for their household spending, etc. This is talking in terms of macroeconomic theory and it is called the 'multiplier effect of money injection' to an economy.

On the flip side of the coin, an economy can shrink if its citizens maintain very high savings or the spending goes out of the economy. This is normally called the 'leakage effect'. Such occurrence can be likened to a sudden stop of the wind or waves at a surfing bay. No surfing can be done and the whole situation is a standstill. The surfers (ie, productive citizens of a country) would not be able to perform at their best.

To digress from the topic of borrowings, critical success factors of these mega-projects lie in the soft skills of the people leading it rather than in the hard skills. Those who lead such ventures must have the passion, discipline, strong peer network and also a certain degree of autonomy along with accountability and transparency.

Most of our local ventures fail not due to bad ideas as some were designed by world-class specialists. They failed because the person appointed to lead these ventures rarely had the discipline, passion and sense of accountability. Lax of monitoring by the powers-that-be (or as we now often refer to as 'pemantauan') and the lack of or no accountability at all by these appointees were the main cause of the failure most of the time. That's why I stress on mindset changes of the citizens of Malaysia rather than blaming it on mega-projects.

Despite shortcomings, most would agree we did quite well in the 1990s as well as earlier part of this decade. We were also doing much better than our neighbours during the 1997 financial crisis period. I can't imagine us spoilt Malaysians being able to undergo IMF and World Bank regimes coupled with the attack on the currency of most Asean countries at that time.

However, the economy seem to have taken a turn when the government decided to 'save' on its spending for the economy. I am sure most citizen of Malaysia would be able to attest to this.