Keep our talent

 

Malaysian pride: Tan, who is from Muar, was appointed to the most senior technology position at Nasa recently. – nasa.gov

 NASA Engineer Florence Tan presented a Maniac Lecture entitled, "From Malaysia to Mars." Florence talked about her journey from Malaysia to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where she has been working on planetary mass spectrometers, which is characterized by challenges, frustration, excitement, and rewards.

 Only with the application of inclusiveness will retain our best workforce.

EVERY time we read about Malaysians making a mark globally in their respective fields, pride and joy course through our veins knowing these people have elevated our country’s standing.

Recently, that proverbial uplifting news featured six young Malaysians acquiring seats in the prestigious Harvard University for the class of 2026.

The students received offers of admission amidst stiff competition from a global applicant pool of 61,220 students, it was reported.

Last week, another piece of good news surfaced. A Malaysian from Muar, Johor, Florence Tan, was appointed Deputy Chief Technologist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) – the most senior technology position.

She had left Malaysia at 18 to study in the United States, and then started to work with Nasa, beginning as an intern at one of its research centres.

When I read those two stories, I couldn’t help pondering if the six Harvard students would return to Malaysia someday, perhaps after gaining experience in the US and other countries.

And what can Tan really do in Malaysia, even if she chose to return home? After all, we can’t cater to her expertise, experience and skill in Your chance to fly Singapore Airlines to London for free with this new card from Maybank

But more and more, when we read of these high achievers, the media is compelled to refer to them as “Malaysia-born,” which is a euphemism for Malaysians who have emigrated overseas and are not nationals of our country any longer.

At least we’re sure that two legendary Malaysians of global repute, Hollywood actress Tan Sri Michelle Yeoh and shoe designer Datuk Jimmy Choo are hanging on to their Malaysian passports.

Unfortunately, Malaysia is one of the countries most affected by brain drain, as it faces a major problem in not only being incapable of delivering the required talent, but also in failing to retain the current local talent or attracting foreign ones, as a report in cs.stanford.edu put it.

The World Bank defines brain drain as the migration of talent across borders, which has an impact on Malaysia’s aspiration to become a high-income nation.

“Human capital is the bedrock of the high-income economy. Sustained and skill-intensive growth will require talent going forward.

“For Malaysia to be successful in its journey to high income, it will need to develop, attract, and retain talent. Brain drain does not appear to square with this objective: Malaysia needs talent, but talent seems to be leaving.

“Brain drain is a subject of intense debate and controversy, but surprisingly few studies have characterised the phenomenon in the Malaysian context – be it in terms of magnitude, impact, or policy response.

“What complicates matters further are the statistical discrepancies that limit the quality, availability, timeliness, and comparability of international migration data,” wrote its senior economic advisor Philip Schellekens.

He quoted the World Bank’s Malaysia Economic Monitor saying that the Malaysian diaspora – the group of skilled and unskilled Malaysia-born women, men and children living overseas – is estimated conservatively at one million worldwide as of 2010.

“A third among these represent brain drain – those with tertiary education among the diasporas. This is not to suggest that others are not ‘brainy’, but educational attainment is the only available proxy that is consistently available across recipient countries.

“To put the numbers in perspective, two factors are important: the size of the skills base and the profile of immigration.

“Because of the narrow skills base, brain drain is intense in Malaysia and is further aggravated by positive selection effects, as the best and brightest leave first.

“Further, brain drain is not alleviated by compensating inflows, since migration into Malaysia is mainly low-skilled with some 60% with primary education or less and the number of high-skilled expats has fallen by a quarter since 2004.”

As of 2019, there are 952,261 Malaysians or Singaporeans of partial or full Malaysian origin residing in Singapore. And including the permanent population in the country, about 350,000 Malaysians cross the Johor-Singapore Causeway daily to commute to work or school.

Australia is another popular choice for Malaysians, with 177,460 people living there in 2020, according to a report, while the 2016 census from the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveals that 138,364 Malaysians became permanent residents or citizens.

There’s nothing wrong with us continuing to look for low-skilled labour for our oil palm estates, restaurants and homes – many West Asian countries are in the same predicament. However, Malaysia needs to embrace the global mobility of talent, too.

For a start, we must admit that the biggest criteria are the differences in earnings, career prospects, opportunities, professional exposure and quality of life.

The elephant in the room for many Malaysians is the discontent with our country’s affirmative policies, particularly among the non-bumiputras who see their chances of climbing up the ladder hampered by their ethnic origin.

The painful truth is, many talented non-bumiputras, especially the Chinese, make up the bulk of the diaspora.

In all fairness, the government, via Talent Corporation Malaysia, has developed many initiatives to encourage Malaysians to return, but a better carrot needs to be dangled.

Singapore, one of the best-run countries, has the same problem as it faces a challenge to retain quality citizens because the country’s brain drain rate is higher than the global average with six in 10 Singa-poreans willing to leave the country in pursuit of a better job, according to a Randstad Workmonitor research report.

The study revealed that the brain drain rate in the Lion City is higher than the global average of 50%. It’s also higher than Hong Kong’s 56%, but slightly lower than Malaysia’s 66%.

It said 68% of Singaporean workers, aged between 18 and 34 years old, are willing to pack up and leave their country.

In many ways, ethnic Chinese, like their forefathers, are a migratory race, regardless of their nationalities, with many selecting Canada and Australia as their choices during the last 20 years, according to statista.com

In 2013, the United States and Canada became the countries with the highest immigration rate of millionaires from China, according to Hurun Research Institute.

China is reportedly one of the world’s largest emigration countries as well as the country with the biggest outflow of high net worth individuals between 2003 and 2013. Likewise for many Hong Kongers and Taiwanese.

Our politicians love to use the term “world class” when they talk about Malaysia, but we need to really walk the talk or else it remains hollow and unconvincing. If we’re indeed top of the heap, we should be getting top notch workers queueing up to work here. 

Wong Chun Wai

Wong Chun Wai began his career as a journalist in Penang, and has served The Star for over 35 years in various capacities and roles. He is now group editorial and corporate affairs adviser to the group, after having served as group managing director/chief executive officer.On The Beat made its debut on Feb 23 1997 and Chun Wai has penned the column weekly without a break, except for the occasional press holiday when the paper was not published. In May 2011, a compilation of selected articles of On The Beat was published as a book and launched in conjunction with his 50th birthday. Chun Wai also comments on current issues in The Star.

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British rivate banks have failed - need a public solution

Private banks have failed – we need a public solution

The Barclays scandal has underlined the City's unmuzzled power. But it also offers a chance to take democratic control

Bob Diamond, who resigned as chief executive of Barclys on Tuesday, is fighting for a payoff of over £20m. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/REUTERS

The greatest danger of the rate-fixing scandal now engulfing the City of London is that it will be managed and defused in the usual way, and nothing will really change. Tuesday's forced resignation of Bob Diamond, the Barclays chief executive, follows well-worn procedures for dealing with crises that potentially threaten those in power: denounce the worst offenders, let a few symbolic heads roll, set up an inquiry under a safe pair of hands, and tweak the regulations to prevent a repetition of the most egregious misdemeanours.

That's been the pattern of the past few years as Britain's establishment has lurched from the disaster of the Iraq war to the disgrace of parliamentary expense fiddling and media phone-hacking (though in the case of Iraq, the only heads to roll were BBC executives and an army corporal). As for the banks that triggered the greatest economic crisis for 80 years, they have been bailed out and featherbedded, with only the loss of the odd sacrificial City baron to show for their reckless mayhem.

But we can't afford to allow such political dereliction again. The racket revealed around the rigging of the crucial Libor inter-bank interest rate – affecting $500tn worth of contracts, financial instruments, mortgages and loans – has underlined the scale of corruption at the heart of the financial system. It follows the exposure of the mis-selling of dodgy derivatives and payment protection insurance, voracious tax avoidance and last month's breakdown of the RBS-NatWest basic payments system.

It's already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclays, and indeed the City of London. This is one of multiple scams that have become endemic in a disastrously deregulated system with inbuilt incentives for cartels to manipulate the core price of finance. Not only that, but the rigging has been public for years – it was first reported in 2008 – and no action has been taken until now.

That echoes the phone-hacking scandal, which erupted eight years after Rebekah Brooks told parliament News International was bribing the police and her admission was entirely ignored. On Tuesday Barclays sought to implicate Whitehall officials in its rate-rigging in 2008, and an angry Diamond, fighting for a payoff of over £20m, can be expected to go further when he appears before the Commons on Wednesday.

As they did with the Murdoch press, politicians who have abased themselves before the financial elite are now denouncing corrupt bankers and each other for failing to bring them to heel. David Cameron, whose party relies on City donors for more than half its income, wants a narrowly Libor-focused parliamentary inquiry to avoid the bigger picture and focus blame on New Labour's enthusiasm for "light touch regulation" in the runup to the crash.

Ed Miliband is rightly pressing for a much broader, Leveson-style public inquiry into the entire banking system. But the reality is that the whole political class embraced deregulated finance in the boom years. While Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pampered the banks, George Osborne and the Conservatives were demanding still less regulation, and even the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable, now the bankers' scourge, endorsed a financial "light touch".

This is yet another disgrace for the country's governing elites. The new revelation of corruption comes after the exposure of the deception of the Iraq war, fraud in parliament and the police, the criminality of a media mafia and the devastating failure of the banks four years ago. It could of course have happened only in a private-dominated financial sector, and makes a nonsense of the bankrupt free-market ideology that still holds sway in public life.

Political and business powerbrokers insist it's all a problem of leadership, bad apples and a culture that has gone awry. But such cultures are generated by structures and systems – and in the case of the City, deregulated short-term profit maximisation has as good as required them. It's certainly necessary to have a clearout of City bosses, prosecutions and wide-ranging inquiries, but only far-reaching change will clear this cesspit.

The financial system has already failed at huge economic and social cost. It has been shown to be corrupt, incompetent, rapacious and economically destructive. The City's claims to be an indispensable jobs and tax engine for the British economy are nonsense: the bailout costs of 2008-9 dwarfed the financial tax revenues of the boom years, which were below those of manufacturing even at their peak.

In fact, the banks are pumped up with state subsidies and liquidity that they are still failing to pass on in productive lending five years into the crisis. A crucial part of the explanation is the unmuzzled political and economic power of the City: its colonisation of Whitehall and public life, effective grip on its own regulation, revolving-door pull on politicians and civil servants, and purchase of political parties. Finance has usurped democracy.

The crash of 2008 offered a huge opportunity to break that grip and reform the financial system. It was lost. The system was left as good as intact, and even the part-nationalised banks, RBS and Lloyds, have since been run at arm's length to fatten them up as quickly as possible for re-privatisation (savage RBS cost-cutting lies behind its humiliating performance last month), instead of as motors of investment and recovery.

The rate-rigging scandal now offers a second opportunity to build the pressure for fundamental change. That's hard to imagine being carried out by a coalition dominated by the City-funded Tories, but Labour has also yet to break fully with its pre-crisis economic model.

Tougher regulation or even a full separation of retail from investment banking will not be enough to shift the City into productive investment, or even prevent the kind of corrupt collusion that has now been exposed between Barclays and other banks. As a report by Manchester University's Cresc research team argues this week, the size and complexity of the modern banking system makes it "near ungovernable".

Only if the largest banks are broken up, the part-nationalised outfits turned into genuine public investment banks, and new socially owned and regional banks encouraged can finance be made to work for society, rather than the other way round. Private sector banking has spectacularly failed – and we need a democratic public solution.

• This article was amended on 4 July 2012. The original misspelled Rebekah Brooks's name as Rebecca. This has been corrected.

• • Seumas Milne  guardian.co.uk,
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