There Will Be Over 500,000 SPM And University Graduates This Year Too

Here are some government statistics that I do not understand. There is more to this news report but I am not reproducing it. Tak faham. 

NST BUSINESS

Covid-19 pandemic massive blow to Malaysian labour market 

unemployed persons surges 16.2% year-on-year in March

610,500 people without any job as of March, Department of Statistics 

unemployment rate of 3.9% March
labour force fell 0.2% to 15.8m persons

MCO March, unemployed 610,500 persons

(Q1) 2020, total jobs in private sector 8.6 million DOSM said

number of jobs during quarter grew marginally 

national labour productivity declined 0.8%

value added per employment RM22,578 per person in Q1 2020 

(Q4 2019: RM24,263 per person).

Despite slower economic performance employment increased 1.6% (Q4 2019: 2.2%)

15.2m persons in Q1 2020 (Q4 2019: 15.3 million)

M'sia's labour productivity for Q1, by value added, rose 2.1% (Q4 2019: 1.4%) 

value of RM40 per hour (Q4 2019: RM42 per hour)

My comments : 

Employment increased?  

Only 8.6 million jobs in private sector? 

(Is total labor force 16.1 million?)

I am confused. This is either poor reporting or just numbers being thrown out.

What about the foreign labour? The foreign workers? Surely they make up a sizeable chunk of our economy. We cannot ignore the foreign workers working and contributing in our economy. 

Exactly how many are there? 2 million? 3 million? 7 million?

Yesterday I saw a figure which said that our total population of close to 33 million includes a foreigners headcount of close to three million. So the actual headcount of Malaysians is closer to 30 million.

But if you just add up theb separate headcounts of the Banglas, Indons, Nepalis etc you are going to get more than three million foreigners. And don't forget the 150,000 or 200,000 Rohingyas. 

Back to the arithmetic - if you divide our GDP output by the actual number of workers (including all the foreign workers) then the arithmetic says you will get a much lower figure for our labor productivity. The denominator becomes much larger.

So these statistics are not really useful. We cannot make properly informed decisions if we do not have good numbers. No one can be 100% accurate but at the same time lets not miss the ballpark completely either. 

Here is some reality folks. This year there will be about 500,000 or so SPM graduates. Well the SPM has been postponed to January 2021.

Then there will be close to another 100,000 graduates from all sorts of higher learning institutions (universities, colleges, institutes etc).

That is already about 600,000 new entrants into the job market. 

Where will they find jobs? 

Will we have 600,000 new jobs in the next 12 months?

The answer is a flat no.

Companies are shutting down, downsizing and firing workers. 

This is going to be long haul economic suffering. 

How do we stimulate the economy and the job market?

By giving RM500 ang pow to the 1.4 million (?) Civil Servants for the Hari Raya?

That is not going to work.

We need output. 

We need productivity.

We need value added.

We need growth.

That is not happening.