Globalisation comes under the spotlight of Covid-19 MalaysiaNow 2 hrs ago
For the past 15 years, Malaysian Faheem Ahmad has been living in Guangzhou, China.
He went there to study Mandarin in 2006 and was supposed to return to Malaysia and teach the language but found a small but lucrative niche in the world of international trade.
While completing his master’s degree, he started a company, Hijrah Trading, with the aim of supplying Chinese goods to Malaysian clients. It took off almost immediately.
“We focus on small businesses that don’t know how to import goods from China. We show them how to do it,” he told MalaysiaNow. “Mostly, I guide them to find manufacturers or suppliers of the goods they want.”
Service professionals still relevant THE SUN
Malaysia is no exception that visualises industrialisation as a catalyst for economic development.
In his book on
The Conditions of Economic Progress published in 1960, Professor Collin Clark predicted that a nation would pass through three stages of economic progress.
As he wrote, “. as time goes on and communities become more economically advanced, the numbers engaged in agriculture tend to decline relative to the numbers in manufacture, which in their turn decline, relative to the numbers engaged in service”.
So far, the Malaysian economic progress has fitted well with Clark’s proposition. The period between 1958 and 1970 saw the dominance of the agriculture sector, which contributed to Malaysia’s economic development.
Pix for representational purpose only.
OF late, there has been a lot of talk about producing future proof graduates or future ready youths (in an economic sense). One of the major proposals is to equip our youths with enough technical knowledge to deal with Industry 4.0. This, I believe, is at best half the solution.
While it would always help to equip ourselves with some technical knowledge, however, an economy will only need a certain number of technical personnel.
To ensure employability of our youths in the future, we will need to predict the development of our economy.
Statistic shows that in 2019, agriculture contributed around 7% to Malaysia’s gross domestic product (GDP), while the manufacturing industry contributed approximately 37% and the services sector about 54%.