Wednesday, March 18, 2015

GST Price Guides

These were supposed to come out a couple of months ago based on the original planned timeline, but I remember some concerns being raised that releasing them too soon might render them inaccurate enough that people might not trust them.

In any case, here they are:

  1. Northern Zone
  2. Eastern Zone
  3. Central Zone
  4. Southern Zone
  5. Sarawak
  6. Sabah

Complaints about retail pricing or price gouging can be addressed to the 1Malaysia One Call Centre (1 800 886 800)

2 comments:

  1. Hi Hisham,
    Do you know if this price guide and all studies on the impact of prices has considered all the inefficiencies of slippery upwards sticky downwards price transfer? In practice, there could be a lot less revision downwards of retail prices than should happen.

    A real life example related by a friend of mine. His products are subject to sales tax of 10%. In the past, the cost is included implicitly into the retail price of his goods. Going into GST, his product enjoys a cheaper tax rate.

    However, in this transition period, he will not be revising down prices. Because he finds it impractical to:
    1) Claim back SST 10% on the taxes he has already paid for unsold inventories
    2) Change his pricing

    He will just be tacking on 6% GST to his existing retail price.

    Just wondering if these inefficiencies were modeled in those studies.

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    Replies
    1. @J

      Agreed. What they've done is to calculate the difference between SST and GST, but in most cases the price difference is so small that there won't be a change in the actual retail price.

      In aggregate however, I'm not expecting an outsize increase in consumer prices. MOF/BNM are expecting about 1% overall.

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