1. "Price of food to go down or we go down on the streets” - as protests in university campus-wide went nation-wide - VIDEO1 that spread to the general public quickly VIDEO2
2. That the prices of chicken and fish, cooking oil and transport have remained stubbornly high, and there is yet any sign on how rapidly inflation shall come down and, even more of an urgency, is not only where are we now as a nation, but what are we doing despite years of consultancy and urging by World Bank to aim high and to accelerate high income growth and a faster developmental effort, we are still politico-economic monsoon-stuck in a quarmire because of economic development under capitalism.
3. As a post-independent country for +60 years, we are still encased in a neoliberalism-induced ethos trapped by neo-imperial design since the Development Advisory Service Harvard in the 1970s intruded onto our economic sphere to dash the equation of an economic equity endowment.
4. The economic nationalism arising from the Guthrie Raid and the extension, and prolonging, of the New Economic Policy only extenuated the unequality of rakyat2 where the top 20% of population – the T20 – possess 46.2% of the nationalincome share, while M40 have 37.4% of the national income share but the bottom 40% of population – the B40 – only get 16.4% of the national income share of wealth.
5. Indeed, Bumiputera in the top income groups (the top 1 per cent and the 10 per cent) benefited the most, (see Khalid lse.blog, 2019) or about 40,000 ethnocapital political-connected families are just running - and ruining - the national economy
6. The World Bank Malaysia Economic Monitor, June 2022, has once again highlighted the incompleteness of tasks in a state of nation report. Post-Covid 19 pandemic, there is a continuing, and an increasingly, vulnerability among Malaysian households causing economic precariousness and corporate debts:
A) Around midyear 2020, the national household debt-to-Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio was 87.5% - according to Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) - that surged to a new peak of 93.3% by December 2020. It is a fact that the majority of urban low-income families are much more likely to be unemployed or have lower working hours with lower pay, and greater challenges in accessing healthcare.
B) Post-pandemic, the situation is that 20.0 per cent of households from the M40 group with income between RM4,850 and RM10,959 had dropped to the B40 group, (DoSM 2022 and The Star 4/04/2022).
C) There is another factor lying in the deficient economic output owing to insufficient higher inflow of foreign direct investments to stimulate a laggard economy as was during the 1970s boom since we had de-industrialised prematurely in the 1990s.
Dr Jayant Menon – an Asian Development Bank (ADB) economist – said it was most unfortunately, and inappropriately too early for Malaysia to have shifted from manufacturing to the FIRE services (Finance, Insurance, Real Estates) because it could have transfer advanced level of technological sophistication plus buildup an educational ecosystem of talented manpower.
7. As it us, the present scarcity – and even inappropriateness of the national education system – of skilled workers (where one-third of our population has a family member in the overstaffed and unproductive redundant civil services - federal, state, GLCs and GLIs) have induced an economic nothingness in malaise, especially with the underdevelopment of development in affected states.
8. Indeed, the present World Bank Malaysia Economic Monitor reported that one major impediment faced by these states is their lower levels of human capital development.……(whence) in the longer term, broadening access to quality education and skills training would (have to) raise the quality of human capital.
9. It is, therefore, a ruling regime's fantasy that the economy would turnaround quickly, and that the inflationary pressures shall recede rapidly - especially with a GE15 which is fraught with third power uprisings.
It is a common knowledge - except those colonised by clientel capitalism - that a recession is already everywhere, and the student protests are just a manifestation of the reality that negative growth shall persist in Malaysia for years to come because the Vision 2020 is already blinded with betrayal.
10. Where are we going?
Nowhere, except the concentralisation of capital among the ethnocapital class and the consolidation of wealth among the GLCs and the ruling kleptocratic elites.
The alternate path to thrust forward progressively is to adopt, apply and adapt to a new idealism in Socialism with Malaysia characteristics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gomez and Saravanamuttu, The New Economic Policy in Malaysia Affirmative Action, Ethnic Inequalities and Social Justice, (ISEAS 2013); KS Jomo, The New Economic Policy and Interethnic Relations in Malaya, (UNRISD 2004), and Lee Hock Guan, Affirmative Action in Malaysia, Southeast Asian Affairs (2005).
R. Thillainathan and Kee-Cheok Cheong, Malaysia’s New Economic Policy, Growth and Distribution: Revisiting the Debate, Journal of Economic Studies 53(1): 51 – 68, 2016 ISSN 1511-R.
CIA, Malaysia’s Unfulfilled Promise: the New Economic Policy in Arrears, October 1985; sanitized copy approved for release on 2011/01/04.
Jomo‘s The Edge 8/01/2020 piece: https://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/my-say-poverty-inequality-and-expectations
NST 14/07/20; a critique of similar model, the Pemandu’s Economic Transformation Plan (ETP) can be found in Research for Social Advancement (REFSA), A Critique of the ETP, Part I and Part II, 25/01/2012.
STORM, Illicit Capital, Illegal Trade and Inequality – Kleptocracy in Malaysia, monsoonsstorms.wordpress.com).