Talent is seen as Malaysia’s persistent headache in its effort to bring in investments.
PETALING JAYA: Talent, or a lack of it for suitable jobs, remains Malaysia’s achilles heel when it comes to attracting more investments, domestic or foreign.
That is what lead economist for Malaysia at the World Bank Apurva Sanghi thinks, as he also highlighted in a tweet on X that other factors affecting investor decision making are policy stability, as well as the quality of both physical and digital infrastructure.
He was responding to a statement released by the Small and Medium Enterprises Association (Samenta) Malaysia, which itself was expressing concern about the country’s drop in the latest International Institute for Management Development World Competitiveness Ranking.
Malaysia fell seven places to 34th out of 67 countries, while in the Asia Pacific region, the country dropped four spots to 10th out of 14 nations, ending up below Thailand and Indonesia for the first time.
And before one asks, city-state Singapore has regained its position at the top of the global list to rub salt on the wounded pride of its northern neighbour, ahead of Switzerland in second place and Denmark in third. Labelling this decline a wake-up call, Samenta said it represents an opportunity for Malaysia to reassess its national priorities, in addition to building a stronger government and business nexus to drive its economy forward.
The association said: “From the 20 sub-factors that provided equal weightage to the ranking, we dropped significantly in five areas: domestic economy; productivity and efficiency; technological infrastructure; management practices; as well as attitudes and values.
”It commented that Malaysia’s gains in international investment, employment and education were insufficient to counter the nation’s plummet in the five sub-factors.
Elaborating, Samenta said within the domestic economy sub-factor, Malaysia was hurt primarily in the real gross domestic product growth per capita indicator, attributable to the rapid increase in the number of unskilled and semi-skilled foreign workers that entered Malaysia in 2023.
This resonates to some degree with Apurva’s view that talent is Malaysia’s persistent headache in its effort to bring in investments.
“We dropped by a whopping 20 ranks – from second to 22nd – in this indicator alone. This in turn has also impacted our performance in the productivity and efficiency sub-factor, as the ranking took into consideration growth in productivity in various sectors each year.
“In fact, our productivity and efficiency subfactor is our weakest rank – at 53rd, a drop of 17 places from 36th in 2023,” Samenta pointed out.
More importantly however, it opined that from the breakdown in declining sub-factors, it is clear that the government cannot be blamed completely for the country’s tumble in the competitiveness ranking.
