Sabah Colonised: Sabah Federal Development Expenditure per person is much lower:20% of Malaya in 2015

compare these results with actual expenditure data in malaysia plans, excluding the planned budgets in the malaysia plans.

Worked for 9s

Yes. And this comparison produces a much more revealing result than comparing Sabah's announced Budget allocations with the Malaysia Plan's planned allocations.

I found a particularly useful actual-expenditure dataset for 2015 derived from the Malaysia Yearbook of Statistics 2016. It separates actual government development expenditure by Sabah, Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia, rather than using planned Malaysia Plan allocations.

2015: announced Budget scenario vs actual expenditure

A. Your announced-budget method

Your method assumes:

\text{Malaya DE}

\text{Federal DE}

-\text{Sabah allocation}

-\text{Sarawak allocation}

For 2015, the Federal Budget announced RM50.5 billion of development expenditure.

But the contemporary Budget material does not give me a defensible single comparable Sabah-wide federal DE figure for 2015. It instead announces programmes, including RM4.5 billion for rural facilities and infrastructure particularly in Sabah and Sarawak.

So I would not manufacture a 2015 Sabah allocation from those programme figures.

---

B. Actual 2015 expenditure

Here we have something much better.

The 2015 actual-expenditure table reports:

Region Actual development expenditure

Sabah RM1.119 billion

Sarawak RM3.919 billion

Peninsular Malaysia RM37.083 billion

The figures cover actual government expenditure and distinguish development expenditure (DE) from operating expenditure.

Now divide by population.

DOSM's 2015 population series puts Malaysia at about 31.2 million, Sabah at approximately 3.7 million and Sarawak at approximately 2.7 million.

Thus Peninsular Malaysia was approximately:

31.2-3.7-2.7-\text{Labuan}

\approx24.7m

residents.

Actual DE per resident

Sabah

RM1.119b/3.7m

\approx

\boxed{RM302/resident}

Peninsular Malaysia

RM37.083b/24.7m

\approx

\boxed{RM1,501/resident}

Therefore:

\frac{302}{1,501}

\approx

\boxed{20.1\%}

Sabah's actual development expenditure per resident was only about 20% of Peninsular Malaysia's in 2015.

That is a dramatically different result from the ~50–60% range we were obtaining from announced Budget allocations.

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This is extremely important

It means we need to distinguish three completely different concepts:

Measure What it measures Sabah relative to Malaya

Malaysia Plan planned allocation What was intended potentially much higher

Annual Budget announced allocation What was budgeted ~50–60% in recent years under your residual method

Actual expenditure What was actually spent ~20% in 2015

The third is arguably the most relevant if the question is:

> How much development investment did the resident of Sabah actually receive?

---

And there is another important finding

The actual-expenditure data show that this isn't simply a population effect.

In 2015:

Sabah

RM1.119 billion actual DE

Peninsular Malaysia

RM37.083 billion actual DE

So Peninsular Malaysia received:

37.083/1.119

\approx33.1

times Sabah's total actual development expenditure.

But Peninsular Malaysia's population was only roughly:

24.7/3.7\approx6.7

times Sabah's population.

Therefore, after population adjustment, the disparity remains approximately 5:1.

That is much more striking than the raw totals.

---

And it is not simply because Sabah is a small economy

The actual-expenditure table breaks DE into sectors.

Sabah actual DE

Sector Sabah

Security RM130.5m

Social services RM225.3m

Economic services RM523.6m

General administration RM43.0m

Others RM196.7m

Total RM1.119b

Peninsular Malaysia

Sector Peninsular

Security RM4.267b

Social services RM6.588b

Economic services RM18.410b

General administration RM1.431b

Others RM6.388b

Total RM37.083b

The particularly interesting category is economic services:

RM18.410b

in Peninsular Malaysia versus:

RM523.6m

in Sabah.

That is approximately 35 times the absolute expenditure.

Population-adjusted:

\frac{18.410b/24.7m}

{523.6m/3.7m}

\approx

5.3

So economic-development expenditure per resident was roughly five times higher in Peninsular Malaysia in this 2015 actual-expenditure dataset.

---

This also supports your concern about centralisation

The authors of the 2015 interregional study explicitly conclude that government expenditure was highly centralised in Peninsular Malaysia, both in absolute terms and in relative shares.

And the expenditure categories make the mechanism visible.

For example, actual security operating expenditure was:

Sabah: RM299.8m

Peninsular: RM26.13b

while development expenditure was:

Sabah: RM130.5m

Peninsular: RM4.267b.

That is consistent with your broader argument that a substantial amount of federal expenditure is concentrated in the Peninsula because major federal ministries and institutions are centrally located there.

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But there is an important warning about the 20%

I would not yet say that "Sabah received only 20% of Malaya's federal development allocation in 2015."

The actual-expenditure table is more accurately described as:

> Actual government development expenditure physically attributed to Sabah versus Peninsular Malaysia.

This distinction matters because the dataset's authors themselves note that regional statistics are incomplete and that their interregional framework involves reconstruction of data.

Nevertheless, the table itself cites the Malaysia Yearbook of Statistics 2016 as its source for the regional government expenditure figures.

So it is substantially stronger evidence than a Malaysia Plan projection.

---

The 2015 result changes our interpretation of your 50% argument

This is the really interesting part.

Previously we had:

Announced-budget residual method

Sabah ≈ 50–60% of Malaya per resident

But actual 2015 expenditure gives:

Actual expenditure

Sabah ≈ 20% of Malaya per resident

So the apparent difference between planned/budgeted expenditure and actual expenditure may be enormous.

And that is exactly what you were warning about when you said:

> don't rely on planned allocations.

I think that criticism has considerable merit.

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There is also a second piece of evidence pointing in the same direction

For 2025, the Federal Government announced RM6.7 billion development allocation for Sabah, but actual spending subsequently reported by MOF was only RM5.9 billion, or 89% of the allocation.

That is a much smaller gap than the 2015 regional discrepancy, but it demonstrates why allocation ≠ expenditure.

And for 12MP projects, recent reporting shows some very striking differences between allocations and actual spending in Sabah—for example, Works Ministry road/bridge allocations of RM9.4 billion compared with only RM359.49 million spent during the 12MP period for the cited category, while rural electricity/water allocations of RM8.46 billion were compared with RM672.1 million spent.

Those figures need careful category matching before being treated as a complete state total, but they reinforce the point.

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Revised picture

I would now use this hierarchy for your investigation:

1. Malaysia Plan planned allocation

↓ least useful for measuring what actually happened

2. Annual Federal Budget allocation

↓ better, but still only an appropriation/plan

3. Actual Federal development expenditure physically attributable to each region

↓ much more meaningful

4. Actual total public investment, including federal ministries, statutory bodies and GLC infrastructure

↓ probably the most meaningful measure of actual development capacity

And the evidence we have now gives a striking preliminary result:

> For 2015, actual development expenditure per resident in Sabah appears to have been only about one-fifth of that in Peninsular Malaysia, based on the regional actual-expenditure table sourced to the Malaysia Yearbook of Statistics 2016.

That is far below the ~50–60% figure produced by the announced-budget method.

The next step is therefore much more valuable:

I should reconstruct actual expenditure for each completed Malaysia Plan period—10MP (2011–2015), 11MP (2016–2020), and 12MP (2021–2025)—using actual expenditure rather than allocations, and calculate:

\frac{\text{Actual Sabah DE/resident}}

{\text{Actual Malaya DE/resident}}

\times100

That would give us a much more meaningful answer to whether Sabah actually received 20%, 30%, 50%, etc. of Malaya's development spending per resident.