Malaysia’s International Competitiveness: Sliding, Sliding …. (Part 1)
Written by Dr. Lim Teck Ghee, CPI
No Escape from International Comparisons and Rankings
First of all: a reality check. We are in a new globalized era in which everyone – whether an individual, a business, an organization or the nation state – has to compete against everyone else, with competitors coming not only from the neighbourhood but from the rest of the world.
Even a simple informal sector business such as a char kway teow stall is competing against other businesses ranging from other noodle stalls to the fried chicken or burgers served by global franchises such as McDonalds.
Today, no person, organization or country can avoid being compared with others in the quality of their product, service, productivity, innovativeness or some other variable. Comparison on quality, pricing, satisfaction and other key consumer concerns is done on a constant basis by all consumers – whether the consumer is looking for lunch, buying a service or seeking to invest his money.
Technological advances and the widespread proliferation of ranking surveys also mean that large organizations are constantly evaluated in terms of the quality of the work or the product or service provided. Together with it, comparisons are also made with other organizations offering similar products or services.
Ten or even five years ago, many organizations could exist in their cocoons or comfort zones of incompetence or inefficiency because there was little way of knowing how their products or services compared with those being offered by similar organizations. Today this lack of comparative information has disappeared.
Information is everywhere and often instantaneously available. The acceleration in migration to the new generation of information technologies has reinforced and proliferated new buying habits and behaviors as consumers exercise more control over where, when, what and how they buy
Scams, shoddy work, over pricing, outrageous claims – these can be gotten away for some time but eventually, sooner rather than later, the truth emerges. There is no place to hide in the global market place.
Even universities and the civil service so long hidden from public scrutiny are no longer immune from being analyzed, evaluated and compared. Two recent reports show how unimpressed foreign experts engaged in international ranking work are with Malaysia’s current institutional reform drive to excel. In the first part of this two part article, we shall deal with the international ranking of our public universities that have received tens of billions of ringgit of public funds and see how they compare with universities of other countries in the region.
