I am grateful to Professor Emeritus Tan Sri Dr. Anuwar Ali, a distinguished Malaysian economist & Chairman of National Minimum Wage Committee, for sharing his feedback to my story titled “Human capital progress has stalled globally, with two-thirds of low, middle-income countries decline in workforce skills” published by newswav.com on Sunday, 13 Sept 2026. I quote “In our home ground, the labor utilization ecosystem is not much better. There's a kind of wage compression for those with salaries around minimum monthly wage of RM1,700 up to RM2,000; affecting the fresh graduates as well.”
I agree today we know that productivity is the true source of competitive advantage. But what we must also realize is that it is the key to social stability as well. For that reason, achieving gains in service productivity comparable with those we have already achieved in manufacturing productivity must be a priority for managers throughout the developed and developing countries. It is an economic truth that real incomes cannot be higher than productivity of service workers rapidly improves, both the social, and the economic position of that large group of people whose numbers rival those of manufacturing workers at their peak, must steadily go down. At a minimum, this raises that prospect of economic, more ominously it raises the prospect of social tension.
According to the World Bank Group report, human capital includes the health, skills, knowledge, and experience that people gather over all their lives to drive productivity and economic growth to reduce poverty. Yet, progress has stalled, and there have been reversals in human capital accumulation over the last 15 years. This setting approach provides people with an understanding of some crucial drivers, such as care for children and adolescents in the home, the social dynamics and quality of the environment in neighborhoods & job attributes that foster learning at work. (openkowledge.worldbank.org)
Zulkifly Baharom (hajizul50@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.
