Muhyiddin: Need to determine if UN expert's poverty assessment factual

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.
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.
“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.
“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).
“(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.