It was announced recently that Malaysia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth is at a remarkable 5.8 per cent in the second quarter of this year, among the highest in the world.
Another positive is the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) ranking of Malaysia as the 23rd most competitive nation in the world, three notches above South Korea.
In terms of efficiency in government spending, Malaysia was ranked 15th, outperforming United Kingdom, Japan and Canada.
After continuous emphasis on Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Malaysia has performed outstandingly in many aspects of the sector, in terms of economic and socio-economic perspectives.
Comparatively, Malaysia comes out tops in the ICT competitiveness index among the developing Asean countries in areas such as Internet users, computers per capita, mobile broadband subscribers, information technology skills, broadband subscribers, cyber security and investment in telecommunication, except Internet bandwidth speed, trailing Thailand.
Malaysia’s ICT push has shown tremendous success — last year, 10,369 or 77 per cent of government services were already available online. Concurrently, the Malaysian government is taking steps to move into the top 15 world ranking in the United Nations Online Services Index by year 2020 from its current ranking of 40 in 2015.
At the current pace, the goal is easily within reach. From the economic point of view, the digital economy contributed 17.6 per cent of Malaysia’s GDP in 2015 and is targeted to achieve 20 per cent by 2020.
Likewise, ICT accounted for 30 per cent and 23.7 per cent of the total goods export and service export, respectively.
In the 11th Malaysia Plan — the government’s strategic five-year plan for 2016 to 2020 — emphasis continues to be given to the importance of digitisation in enhancing the public services, but with the extension of speed and accuracy through innovative and creative approaches.
Under this phase, the focus is more on providing better accessibility and convenience, which includes deploying services through multiple channels, such as mobile platforms, strengthening cyber security protection, single sign-on and shifting from agency-based to service and information-based approach.
The government is also focusing on implementation of data sharing through a cloud-based service to host public sector data and online applications in the government data centre.
Yet again, in the Malaysia Education Blueprint (2013-2025), leveraging ICT is one of the components to shift the national education system to a world-class standard.
The annual government education expenditure was at 5.5 per cent of the GDP in 2013, much higher than other countries in the region, such as Thailand (4.1 per cent), Indonesia (3.4 per cent) and Singapore (2.9 per cent) and even Japan (3.7 per cent).
Schools are equipped with ICT facilities, including computers, computer labs and broadband Internet connection and the Virtual Learning Environment for teaching and learning has started becoming a trend.
Come 2050, virtual and augmented reality and the consumption of services via digital platforms, such as education, healthcare and virtual tourism, will be parts of people’s life. All buildings, transport vehicles and city assets will be “smart” and interconnected to the “smart grid” and people will work mostly from pods at home as the concept of physical office will cease to exist.
The government has opted wisely to push for ICT to shape the country’s future.
Come 2050, we will be able to see the shape of that future.
Megat Zuhairy Megat Tajuddin and Ibrahim Rohman
United Nations University, Portugal