The project required fresher ideas, said Geoffrey Williams of Malaysia University of Science and Technology (MUST) and Mohamed Aslam Haneef of International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM).
Muhyiddin said at a recent economic forum that Malaysia needed to become a global export player producing new, sophisticated and high-value products.
He also said Malaysia needed to develop home-bred multinational companies because the payoff in economic growth would be “very high”.
Williams told FMT he felt that the attachment to manufacturing, in a world in which the services sector was becoming more dominant, reflected an old-fashioned mindset.
“The middle-income trap happens if countries can’t produce high-value-added products and have lost their competitive advantage from low-wages, usually in manufacturing,” he said.
“It causes slower growth, lower investment and difficulty in keeping up with advanced lifestyles.
“Malaysia cannot rely on low-wage competition, especially since this now relies on foreign workers who are suffering terribly, as the human resources minister has said.
“It should focus on its domestic capacity to raise wages to a decent standard, help people save for retirement and provide social support, especially for the rural poor.”
Williams said Putrajaya should set its sights on the future of work and on areas that were resistant to automation since Malaysia was not investing in research and development as heavily as many other countries were doing.
He also said Malaysia should learn to use new technology instead of continuing to “dream of creating” innovations and should nurture small and medium-sized enterprises, which he described as the backbone of a successful economy.
“Creating a social market economy with competition at the core, good legal protection and efficiency in taxes to encourage investment would help create sustainable prosperity and social justice,” he said.
“The political will to stop five-year central planning and to allow the market to lead in economic development is essential. The government should do less.”
Aslam referred to Muhyiddin’s statement on the need to create local multinational companies and said this had been talked about for 30 years.
He said all the talk about a knowledge economy and Industrial Revolution 4.0 had not led to any reduction in the percentage of “low- and medium-income jobs”.
“The industry keeps saying universities aren’t producing the kind of graduates needed, but the industry isn’t producing graduate-level jobs. Underemployment is an increasingly worrying trend,” he said.
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