Focus on people’s well-being, not nation’s wealth, Jomo tells govt

 

Jomo Kwame Sundaram says people are more concerned about their quality of life rather than the country’s GDP.

PETALING JAYA: The government must focus more of its efforts on improving Malaysians’ well-being instead of increasing the country’s wealth or gaining international recognition.

Khazanah Research Institute research adviser Jomo Kwame Sundaram said the days of measuring livelihoods according to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) was behind us.

“Ordinary people are not really excited about what the GDP numbers say, they are concerned about what it means for their quality of life,” he said at the online launch of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) 2020 Human Development Report today.

Jomo said the country’s current policies were often based on trends and discussions in the West, rather than according to the needs of its own people.

An example of this, he said, was children’s lack of access to online learning devices, which could have been countered by relying on more traditional methods such as classes on the radio or television.

“Children have lost eight months of education unnecessarily, because public policy choices, which could have been very different, were in search of modernity and wanting to be part of the digital age.”

Meanwhile, Gan Pek Chuan, programme manager of biodiversity and sustainable development at UNDP Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam, said there was a need for more engagement with policymakers at Parliament level about sustainable development.

She called for the government to set up a committee to specifically tackle environmental and sustainability issues, adding that it could raise awareness among politicians, informing them how such issues impacted social well-being, health and economics.

The UNDP report, which measures a nation’s health, education and standards of living, found that Malaysia’s Human Development Index value had increased by 26% over the past 30 years, putting the country in 62nd place out of 189 countries and territories.

According to the report, there was some improvement in terms of longer life expectancy average and increased gross national income per capita.

Life expectancy at birth for Malaysians had also increased by 5.3 years and expected years of schooling had grown by 3.9 years.

However, such achievements were made at the cost of the environment, with Malaysia recording 8.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per capita as opposed to Sweden’s 4.1 tonnes and Sri Lanka’s 1.1 tonnes.

Noting that not a single country had made big achievements without damaging the planetary systems, the report called for urgent reviews on social, economic and environmental policies to make for more sustainable human progress worldwide. - FMT