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Can PEMANDU steer us to high-income status when it has made zero headway in the area of Financial Services, while gunning full speed towards mega projects?
PEMANDU envisions Financial Services to provide 15% of the income boost that will take us to high-income status. However, not a single EPP (Entry Point Project) has been announced within the Financial Services NKEA (National Key Economic Areas) so far. Many would be surprised to learn that the Kuala Lumpur International Financial District (KLIFD) is not a Financial Services EPP (Entry Point Project).
KLIFD was initially a ‘common enabler’ under Financial Services, but has since been reclassified under the Greater KL/Klang Valley NKEA. This puzzling reclassification becomes more mystifying when it is found that the KLIFD is not mentioned at all in Bank Negara’s Financial Services Blueprint 2011 to 2020. Is PEMANDU in sync with Bank Negara, the key financial services regulator?
On the other hand, more than half of the RM176 billion investments achieved in the Economic Transformation Programme (ETP) so far is currently skewed into the MRT and Petronas RAPID mega projects, as well as the Oil, Gas, and Energy NKEA. What happened to the diversified growth spread across 12 NKEAs, as promised by the ETP?
Read our Critique of the ETP (Part 5) as we examine the narrow path taken by PEMANDU so far on the ‘economic transformation roadmap’.
Click here for an archive of our Focus Papers.
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