EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In this new edition, our theme revolves around the COVID-19 pandemic where we explore impacts to industries and our country’s socioeconomic. Our focus however is not at the expense of ignoring other global and local events and trends, but rather prioritising on the traditional economic leading indicators in the context of COVID-19 to equip the readers with information to identify tipping points presented about by this pandemic and, how to deal with it in the post crisis. As widely acknowledged, COVID-19 has caused socioeconomic havoc and chaos across the globe. One positive way of looking at the current troubles is the world should hit the reset button in the post crisis. The ‘new normal’ seems like the favourite catch phrase around the globe. In the absence of vaccines, to stop corona virus, nations need to radically change almost everything they do: how work is done, exercise, socialise, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members. A thinking nation would take this opportunity (yes, it is true what they say about what the threat does) and run with it. We explore insights from our team and industry experts as to how the Government and industry could prepare and equip themselves when the economy and social life return to normal (new normal), post pandemic. Digging deep into the performance of high technology locally and globally; we focused on how the pandemic impacted the local economy consisting of various industries and societies at large. As recession is underway and before it becomes severe, Malaysia like other economically advanced countries adopted expansionary fiscal policy by putting stimulus packages in place to assist the local businesses and putting more money directly into the pockets of consumers. Several government driven initiatives and programmes are introduced to keep our economic engine humming such as assisting micro-SMEs and limiting retrenchment. To date, the Government has announced USD59.6 billion to fight the COVID-19 virus. We recognise that the pandemic COVID-19 is a low probability, high impact event that comes around maybe once in a lifetime. The last time the world had witnessed an economic downturn of this magnitude was the Great Depression in 1929 in the U.S.
It took a decade for the U.S. to recover, but we predict the Malaysian economy will take a lot less time than that to recover due to the built-in resiliency other than economic stimulus and policies such as effective public healthcare management and infrastructure and, obedience citizens. We outline suggestions on how to deal with this sort of rare and black swan event moving forward from a policy perspective. For decades, public policies have been designed to deal with such current and post events yet apparently not enough. Several times over the last fewdecades, pandemic and endemic have caused either mild or severe socioeconomic disruptions. We ask pertinent questions about our understanding, approaches to policy making and its implementation. We suggest a technique to formulate policies, rules, and regulations, as far as the government is concerned. The technique is to detect fragility in all aspects of the socioeconomic in Malaysia. This is important because fragility comes directly from nonlinearity and convexity effects, and that convexity is measurable. The technique, in a position to detect acceleration of harm, applies to anything that entails making decisions under uncertainty, and risk management. We close by proposing the National Interest Guiding Principles in formulating and reformulating viable policies to motivate industry players to create positive economic impact to stakeholders. We hope lessons learned from crisis such as COVID-19 help us navigate to a better Malaysia.
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Malaysian Technology Strategic Outlook 2019/2020 Intergration of High Technology
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