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Speech By DAP Secretary-General And MP For Bagan Lim Guan Eng During The Supplementary Budget 2014 In Dewan
Rakyat, Kuala Lumpur On 31.3.3014.
DAP disagrees with the World Bank that the poor quality of Malaysia’s education system is more worrying than the level of debt in its households. Dr Frederico Gil Sander, who is World Bank senior economist for Malaysia, explained that the country’s substandard education system would affect the pool of skilled talent it needs to grow its economy to become a high-income nation, while high household debt is not necessarily a problem if the economy continues to grow and citizens are gainfully employed. Malaysia records the second highest household debt in Asia from 81.1% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2012 to 86.8% of GDP in 2013.
DAP believes that both are equally as big a national economic threat to Malaysia and likely to derail Vision 2020 of transforming Malaysia into a developed economy. High household debt diminishes the quality of life with social records invariably showing that children’s education would be amongst the first to suffer when economic distress strikes. Further our income is not growing quickly enough to provide a discernible improvement in the quality of life and our citizens are not gainfully employed with rising-income jobs.
Labour unions claim that generally during the last decade, productivity rose by 6.7% annually but real wages inched up by just 2.6% each year. The situation in the manufacturing industry is more distressing with real wages of export-oriented industries increasing by 1.9% whilst that of domestic-oriented industries rose by 1.4% after 1997.