Posted on 5 August 2013 - 08:59pm
Last updated on 5 August 2013 - 09:32pm
KUALA LUMPUR (Aug 5, 2013): Malaysia needs to relook the implementation of its New Economic Model (NEM) to succeed in the long term, said Datuk Nicholas S. Zeffreys, past president and board member of the American Malaysian Chamber of Commerce (AmCham).
He said to succeed, Malaysia also needed to do many things now, the first being the implementation of the goods and services tax (GST), which has been delayed, and hopefully would be included in the next budget.
"Malaysia is not earning much revenue but spending more. The country depends a lot on Petroliam Nasional Bhd to fund 44% of its budget.
"This is unhealthy to run the country based on the funding of a company. As such, the GST is expected to transform change in that regard," Zeffreys said.
He said this on the sidelines of the ceremony to present Amcham-Malaysian-American Commission on Educational Exchange Scholarship Award 2013 here today.
Zeffreys was a member of the team involved in the formulation of the NEM.
He said a country cannot be healthy without competition.
"The country needs to address the issue of liberalisation of services sector, which is expected to be the next big growth area. This is going on at a very slow rate because of protectionism in certain areas," he said.
Zeffreys said another issue was that investments from private sector were less than half of what they used to be 10-15 years ago and ever since the economic crisis.
He said to address the various issues, the NEM team should be reconvened and a post-mortem be undertaken on the various models and their implementation.
Meanwhile, he said, the Malaysia media were also playing on issues which could scare off investors from Malaysia. – Bernama
No comments:
Post a Comment