Lack of local company participation in renewable energy: Jomo

Malaysia can eventually opt out of the CPTPP simply by not ratifying it. Such a diplomatic approach should not embarrass Japan, Australia, Singapore and others remaining for geo-strategic or other pretexts

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia has enormous potential in the renewable energy sector but unfortunately there is a lack of participation by local companies in this area, says economist Prof Jomo Kwame Sundaram.

Jomo said although Malaysia is the largest solar panel exporter to the United States, most of the participants in the market are foreign companies based in Malaysia.

“The whole world is concerned about global warming and the energy sector has a huge potential to grow. Unfortunately, we do not have many local companies that are involved in green energy yet.

“We need to start incubating our local industries to be internationally competitive and the fundamentals are already there.

“It is not that we have to map it from scratch,” he told reporters after a panel discussion organised by Khazanah Research Institute.

Jomo was one of the many panelists, during the panel discussion, who shared his views on the country’s economic performance.

He also said that industries and relevant authorities needed to rethink on how to resume industrialisation under the present circumstances.

“The world economy has changed a lot from since the 90s when we were industrialising. In this situation, we have to admit that some of the policies are outdated and we need to update them,” he said.

Jomo also stressed that new jobs that were created today needed to have value-added unlike the service sector that only create traditional jobs.

“In this scenario, expanding government employment is not productive. To be internationally competitive, industries have to address its weaknesses and identify its strength,” he said.

Meanwhile, Khazanah Research Institute has released a book on Structure of the Malaysian Economy: An Input-Output Analysis, which addressed the lack of linkage between large multinational corporations and small medium enterprises (SMEs).

“SMEs and large-sized sectors are found to be highly linked but large sized sectors are less integrated with SMEs and the loose connection is in the production chain,” it said. — Bernama