Numbers don’t paint a rosy picture

December 15th, 2009 by poobalan | View blog reactions Leave a reply »
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Some excerpts from speeches by Finance Minister II:

– While Singapore and Korea’s nominal per capita GDP grew within the last three decades by 9 and 12 times, respectively, ours only by a factor of 4.

– Amongst our peers, China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand, our real GDP growth in the last three years was the second lowest at 5.5%.

– Our manufacturing sector is not investing up the value chain while our services sector remains low in growth and under-developed.

– Our economy has been stagnating in the last decade. We have lost our competitive edge to remain as the leader of the pack in many sectors of the economy. Our private investment has been steadily in decline. Our private investment is now half of what it was since the Asian crisis while both manufacturing and service sectors have become less capital intensive. For the period 2000 to 2007, our investment per value-added in percentage nominal terms in manufacturing dropped from 30.6% to 21.7% while the services sector, the decline is from 26.8% to 22.1%.

– We know that the bumiputras do not hold the bulk of Malaysia’s wealth. A simple analysis of our capital account will show that there has been a continuous outflow of capital from our shores. In this mobile world, capital will always flow to jurisdictions that are perceived to be more secure, not necessarily the ones that give a higher return.

– The mismatch between our industry’s needs and the output from the local universities has resulted in Malaysia having the highest unemployment rate of graduates, at close to 4.0%, compared to, for example, Ireland, Korea and Singapore.

– We are most unhappy that the private sector’s share in its contribution to our Nation’s GDP has steadily declined since the Asian Financial Crisis. We are also alarmed by the decline in the private sector’s level of investment, both in the manufacturing and services industries.

Not sure if this guy will around next year if there’s a cabinet reshuffle, going by the way the facts are presented.

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