Malaysia to continue enhancing competitiveness despite improvement, says Mustapa
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 7 (Bernama)-- Malaysia will continue to strive for improvement despite achieving the target of being among the top 25 countries in the latest Global Competitiveness Report by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Minister of International Trade and Industry, Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamed said the improvement in ranking to 21st spot among 142 countries, is also confirmation of the people's positive perception of economic prospects and government in different delivery areas.
"Going forward, we need to improve all 12 pillars, by working harder," he added.
The 12 pillars are institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, health and primary education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labour market efficiency, financial market development, technological readiness, market size, business sophistication and innovation.
Malaysia was in 26th spot in last year's Global Competitiveness report.
Meanwhile, Mustapa said the area of technological readiness locally, still required more attention as its ranking in this regard had dropped to 44th spot from 40th previously.
He said the government would maintain its commitment to make improvements through various initiatives such as the formation of the Special Innovation Unit (Unik) in January this year.
"Unik has run well for the last eight months and hopefully, we can build better ecosystems for research and development (R&D) in universities, as well as the ability to absorb new technologies from abroad," he added.
Mustapa said Unik would also continue to play a critical role in coordinating all R&D efforts and commercialisation in higher learning institutions locally as a response to the latest findings.
| « Malaysia's plantation firms have potential to emerge as large energy players | | | Committed investments in Iskandar reach RM76b as of first half 2011 » |
