Is Malaysia’s Economy a Porsche on paper and a Proton on the Ground?

 

According to the Department of Statistics Malaysia, Malaysia’s economy grew 6% in the second quarter of 2026, the country’s strongest Q2 growth outside the pandemic period since 2014. Unemployment stood at 3.0% for the quarter, edging up only slightly from 2.9% in Q1. Headline inflation rose to a modest 1.9%. By almost every conventional measure, the Malaysian economy is performing well. Yet the picture looks very different for the rakyat.

There is a persistent sense that wages are not stretching as far as they used to, that costs keep climbing even as official inflation stays low, and that the prosperity in the national accounts simply is not showing up in household budgets.

A regional survey released in September found cost of living to be Southeast Asia’s single biggest social concern, cited by 42% of respondents, with Malaysia’s own optimism levels notably tempered by it.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One

The economy is growing but the people are not feeling it. So, the million-dollar question is, why? What follows is one attempt at an answer, not the final word on it. It starts with a simple observation: everyone is technically competing in the same race, but nobody is driving the same car.

Bank Negara governor Datuk Seri Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour has been explicit about what is driving the headline figure: manufacturing strength on continued global demand for electrical and electronic components tied to artificial intelligence and data centre construction. This is real, but narrow, dependent on capital-intensive investment, global supply chains, and a relatively small number of large export-oriented firms.

These are Porsches in Malaysia’s economic race, purpose-built for this exact moment in the global economy. They cross the line first, and that part is real.

A new data centre or expanded chip fabrication line creates high-value jobs for engineers and technicians, but it does not, in the short run, raise the income of a retail assistant in Kuching, a hawker stall operator in Chemor, or an administrative clerk in Johor Bahru.

The same Q2 data also show what the rest of the field is driving. Agriculture contracted 3.7%, reversing from 2.6% growth in Q1, on weak oil palm and fishing output. Services eased slightly too, to 5.4%, though it remains the largest single contributor to overall growth. Mining is the exception worth an explanation. It rebounded to 10.2% growth after contracting in Q1, but this tracks global energy prices amid the Middle East conflict, not any shift in the sector’s role for ordinary workers, mining employs a small fraction of the workforce compared with agriculture, retail, or services. None of these domestic-facing sectors are accelerating the way the AI-linked engine is, nor should they be expected to. They are also where most of the workforce is employed.

DOSM figures show MSMEs accounted for almost half of total employment in 2025, 48.7%, or 8.09 mil people, spread across retail, hospitality, agriculture, and small-scale manufacturing. This is the sedan most working Malaysians are actually driving: reliable enough for daily use but never built to keep pace with an F1 car. Above all, the gap is not a matter of effort. Same fuel, different costs.

Roughly a year into BUDI95, Malaysia’s flagship fuel subsidy rationalisation, its lagging effects are starting to show. Full rollout came in September 2025, followed by a further quota cut this past April, and it’s this ongoing tightening that distinguishes this lap of the race from Malaysia’s past two-speed moments. The issue is not whether the policy makes sense, but how unevenly its impact lands. Every car runs on fuel, but a rise in fuel cost does not register the same way for every car.

Transport and logistics costs seep into nearly every other price, and when they rise for households no longer covered by blanket subsidies, the effect does not show up cleanly in the 1.9% headline inflation figure.

It shows up instead in what many Malaysians experience as everyday inflation, food away from home, transport-dependent services, the small recurring costs of running a household or small business.

A household on the domestic-facing track, where income growth has been modest, experiences the same subsidy adjustment as a proportionally larger bite out of a budget that was not expanding to begin with. The policy may be sound and necessary. Its distributional timing, arriving while one part of the economy surges and the other merely holds steady, is what turns a fiscally responsible reform into felt financial strain for a large share of the population.

To return to the analogy: the Proton sedan feels this pinch immediately as its budget was never built with much margin. The Porsche, by contrast, barely notices the same rise in fuel cost against a defined revenue stream from various businesses of its owner. Different cars need different strategies.

To be clear, I am not arguing against subsidy rationalisation. Fiscal discipline, targeted subsidy reform, and Malaysia’s push to attract high-value AI and data centre investment are each sound policy directions on their own merits, and the second quarter’s figures reflect real, creditable achievement. This is not a case of Malaysia’s economic management having failed. The issue is sequencing and absorption, not direction, and no amount of steady driving closes a gap between two fundamentally different machines. Something else may need to change the terms of the race. 

Malaysia is not the first country to face this problem, a narrow, foreign-investment-driven engine generating headline growth the rest of the economy does not proportionately feel. Ireland offers one parallel worth considering: a small number of multinational tech and pharmaceutical firms account for a strikingly large share of its corporate tax revenue, disconnected from activity in the rest of the Irish economy. Dublin’s response, modelled explicitly on Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, has been to divert a portion of that windfall into long-term investment vehicles rather than spend it through the ordinary budget. Notwithstanding, Ireland’s own fiscal watchdog has warned the government is saving too little of it and spending too much now, a reminder that the temptation to let the fast car keep everything it earns is not unique to any one country.

Malaysia’s version of this question, whether AI-linked investment and export revenue should be treated, in part, as a windfall to be channelled deliberately toward the rest of the field, deserves its own careful examination.

A sedan does not become a Porsche by driving more carefully. Understanding where the growth is coming from, and where it has not yet reached, seems a reasonable place to start before anyone proposes how to bring the rest of the field closer to the front.

Reference:

Malaysia’s economy is an F1 car on paper, a sedan on the ground, Dr Mohd Zaidi Md Zabri, Focus Malaysia, 28 Sept 2026

Average Monthly Salary of Malaysians in 2025

 

The total number of monthly salary and wage earners rose to 12.01 million, up from 11.96 million in 2024. Malaysians accounted for 10.38 million, or 86.4% of all full-time paid employees. The average monthly salary and wage of Malaysians increased by 4.1% to RM3,803 in 2025, compared with RM3,652 the previous year, according to the Salaries and Wages Survey Report 2025 published by the Department of Statistics (“DOSM”). The median monthly salary and wage increased by 5.3% to RM2,940 from RM2,793 in 2024. 

 

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org

The services sector, which represents 71.5%, was the main contributor to the increase in the number of wage earners, rising by 1.8% to 7.42 million people. Meanwhile, mining and quarrying had the highest average monthly salary and wage at RM6,175, followed by services (RM3,993), manufacturing (RM3,357), construction (RM3,188) and agriculture (RM2,575), according to DOSM. 

In terms of skills, skilled workers, accounted for 36.6% of all salary earners, recorded the highest average monthly salary and wage at RM5,799, compared with RM5,582 in 2024. The semi-skilled category, which accounted for 55.6% of salary earners, recorded a 4.2% increase in average salary to RM2,714 from RM2,604, while the low-skilled category rose by 2.6% to RM2,184 from RM2,128. 

Selangor recorded the highest share of salary earners, at 25.6% of the total number of paid Malaysian workers, followed by Johor (13.6%) and Sarawak (7.6%). Five states recorded average monthly salaries and wages above the national level: Putrajaya (RM5,417), Kuala Lumpur (RM4,955), Selangor (RM4,258), Penang (RM3,912) and Labuan (RM3,887). 

It looks pathetic. With rising cost of living the average wage may not be sufficient to survive in large urban areas. Employers who are generous are few and far between. Large banks, for example, make RM4 billion a year but employees at mid-level or low-level are paid below satisfactory level. The next stage will be AI. The use of AI soon will result in many jobs including counter clerks, transaction officers and credit officers becoming irrelevant. The digital wave is going to affect many industries, and some will have to re-skill for the future. 

Reference:

Average monthly salary of Malaysians up 4.1% to RM3,803 in 2025, FMT, 21 Sept 2026

Littoral Combat Ships or Littoral Cruise Ships?

 

The littoral combat ship (LCS) project is running behind schedule again with weaknesses found in its implementation. According to the Auditor-General's Report Series 2/2026 tabled in Parliament on Monday (Oct 5), the project was 7.55% behind schedule as of 25 June 2026. All five LCS vessels experienced completion delays ranging from 30 to 108 days. 

If the physical handover (PHO) takes place by 26 December 2026, it will be handed over without achieving full operational capability, as training and the weapons systems have yet to be completed. Full operational readiness of the vessels depends on the complementary contract, which can only be completed in December 2035, beyond the expiry of the main contract on April 25, 2030. 

The report said the PHO delay of LCS 1 would affect the handover of the remaining vessels. The procurement was carried out through direct negotiation. The construction of six LCS vessels, with an original contract value of RM9.128bil and a contract period of 10 years, was from Oct 3, 2013, to Oct 2, 2023. 

During the implementation, eight supplementary contracts to the main contract were signed to amend and align the contractual terms with the requirements of the project’s implementation. Following these supplementary contracts, the construction scope now involves five LCS vessels, with a contract value of RM11.227bil and the contract period extended until April 25, 2030,". The payment mechanism has also been restructured from being milestone-based to progress-based. 

Cumulative payments under the main contract amounted to RM8.557bil, or 76.22% of the RM11.227bil contract value, leaving a balance of RM2.670bil. For the procurement of the complementary contract, the government had made payments of RM100mil for the procurement of integrated logistics support and trial aids (ILS-TA) and 124.35mil euros for the surface-to-surface missile (SSM) system. No payments had been made for the procurement of the surface-to-air missile (SAM), ammunition (for the) 3P medium calibre gun (3P MCG) and integrated decoy launching system (IDLS), as the procurements had yet to be finalised.

In response to the audit findings, the Defence Ministry said the technical committee had instructed the contractor to take appropriate action to ensure that work progress remains in line with the stipulated targets. 

The Auditor-General recommended that the ministry establish a realistic recovery action plan to ensure that all critical activities under the main contract and complementary contract are coordinated with the scheduled PHO of the LCS vessels. It also recommended that the ministry ensure any conditional acceptance of the vessels clearly sets out the contractor’s obligations, completion timelines and responsibilities until the vessels achieve the stipulated capabilities. It also called for the project progress monitoring to be strengthened by setting milestones, designating officers responsible and establishing completion timelines for each critical issue until the project is successfully completed. 

Contract value has increased; number of vessels to deliver is now five instead of six; LCS 1 if handed over in December 2026, will not have any weapons – just the boat! Maybe we could do a cruise ship for peace instead of a defence ship for war! Why do we get into this muddle? Because of greed and corruption? Because of poor project management? Because we awarded contract to the wrong party? Or, all of the above? AG is very kind, please set a recovery plan, o a unconditional acceptance of ships and have proper progress reviews or monitoring via milestones! Wonder if by the time we receive an operational ship by 2035, will it be obsolete? 

 

Source: Auditor General’s Report 2/2026 

Reference:

Auditor-General's Report: LCS project behind schedule again, Ragananthini Vethasala, Divya Theresa Ravi and Gerard Gimino, 05 Oct 2026

 

BRICS Power!

 

BRICS is no longer just a group of countries. It is becoming a significant economic bloc.

A quick look at the numbers makes the scale interesting. The expanded BRICS group represents economies with very different sizes, structures and strengths.

China → $20.85T
India → $3.96T
Russia → $2.66T
Brazil → $2.64T
Indonesia → $1.54T
Saudi Arabia → $1.39T
UAE → $621.5B
South Africa → $480B
Egypt → $429.6B
Iran → $300.3B
Ethiopia → $121.5B

Together, the infographic puts their combined GDP at around $34.99 trillion.

But the more interesting part is not just the total.

It is the diversity.

Different markets.
Different resources.
Different industries.
Different growth stories.

And together, they represent a growing part of the global economic landscape. 

 

Reference:

Post by Pragya Bothra on LinkedIn

Global Trade Power is Concentrated!

 

The world’s largest exporters remain dominated by a small group of economic powerhouses. According to the figures presented in this WTO-sourced visualization:

🇨🇳 China — $3.8T
🇺🇸 United States — $2.2T
🇩🇪 Germany — $1.8T
🇳🇱 Netherlands — $939B
🇯🇵 Japan — $738B
🇮🇹 Italy — $726B
🇰🇷 South Korea — $709B
🇦🇪 UAE — $707B
🇫🇷 France — $683B
🇲🇽 Mexico — $665B

But export rankings tell only part of the story.

For investors, corporates and governments, the more important question is where the next generation of trade flows, infrastructure requirements and industrial capacity will emerge.

Several structural themes stand out:

-China remains the central manufacturing and export powerhouse, despite continued diversification of global supply chains.

-The United States is accelerating industrial investment, supported by technology, energy and advanced manufacturing.

-Europe remains exceptionally important to global trade, with Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France and Belgium among the leading exporters.

-Mexico and Southeast Asia are gaining strategic importance as companies redesign supply chains and pursue nearshoring and “China+1” strategies.

-The UAE is becoming an increasingly important global trade, logistics and energy hub, connecting Asia, Africa and Europe.

-Energy, commodities, ports, logistics, manufacturing and trade finance remain essential infrastructure behind these flows.

The largest opportunities may not necessarily be in the countries exporting the most today. They may be found in the economies attracting the next wave of manufacturing, logistics infrastructure, energy investment, processing capacity and cross-border capital. Capital increasingly follows trade corridors. And understanding how those corridors are changing can provide an important indication of where future investment opportunities may emerge.

 

 

Reference:

INVEST | Connecting Capital. Opportunities. Markets, LinkedIn

NGO Wants Bumi Equity Raised to 50%!

 

NGO Pertubuhan Negarawati Tanah Air has apparently called for Bumiputera equity ownership to be raised to 50% in line with the growing Bumiputera population. Demanding serious attention from the government of the day, Bibi Sunita Sakandar Khan who is chairman of the all-Malay women movement said the current 30% target should not remain an unfulfilled, long-standing objective.

 

While the Bumiputera Economic Transformation Plan 2035 (PuTERA35) has set the target of increasing Bumiputera equity ownership by individuals and Bumiputera mandated agencies to 30% by 2035, data from the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) for 2025 shows that Bumiputera make up 70.5 % of Malaysian citizens.

 

 

Given that Bumiputera constitute over 70% of the citizenry, it is reasonable for the government to assess whether a long-term economic aspiration higher than 30% is needed, the Parti Wawasan Negara supreme council member justified in her Budget 2027 wish-list to Malay language news portal TV Pertiwi. If Bumiputera form most citizens, why should the ambition for economic mastery stop at 30%? We don’t wish for the 30% figure to be passed down from one generation to the next as a target that is constantly cited but never realised. Unfortunately, I can’t see why 50% is easier to achieve?

 

Interestingly, Malay netizens felt ashamed with the NGO’s demand with one rightly pointed out that non-Bumi toiled hard without governmental assistance to earn a living. Another felt that the demand by Pertubuhan Negarawati Tanah Air was unjust even if the current 30% Bumiputera equity quota is mandated by law.

 

This is not a feasible policy from an investment perspective. If only 50% were to provide output while the balance is on a “free ride”, there will be less private investment (DDI or FDI) going forward. Further, no significant discussion is taking shape as to the current level, who benefits, and why has it failed to-date. The actual Bumiputra equity participation in the economy is probably 40-45%.

 

Madani must be clear on NEP 2.0 and work-out a plan that benefits underprivileged groups with educational, employment and entrepreneurial opportunities rather than a single figure that is neither achievable nor realistic.

 

Reference:

Malay women’s NGO wants Bumi equity raised to 50% in line with diminishing non-Bumi populace, Focus Malaysia, 14 Sept 2026

Proton vs Perodua: And the Winner is…

 

For over a decade, Perodua lapped Proton so routinely that the only suspense was the size of the winning margin. But a change appears to be taking shape. In the first half of 2026, Proton registered 98,010 new vehicles, a jump of 40.5% and its best first half since 2002. Perodua still led comfortably with 158,295 units, but its sales slipped 4.7%.

 

A year ago, Perodua was outselling Proton by 2.4 cars to one. Today it is 1.6 to one, the closest the two have been since 2013. Together, the national brands now command 67% of the Malaysian market, leaving every foreign carmaker to squabble over the rest.

 

              

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org

 

Perodua’s cars are built on the bones of Japan’s Daihatsu, a Toyota subsidiary. Proton, meanwhile, has been 49.9% owned by China’s Geely since 2017, and its bestsellers began life as Geely models. The X50 born as the Binyue and the X70 as the Boyue. Strip away the badges and this is almost like a proxy war: Japanese car-making versus Chinese car-making, fought on Malaysian roads with Malaysian wallets as the prize.

 

If you go back to 2017, Proton was in the doldrums. Its market share near historic lows and its finances under strain. Then Geely took its stake, and the transformation has been remarkable. Proton closed 2025 with 157,976 units sold and a 19.4% market share, alongside record exports. It is now gunning for 200,000 units in 2026. In January, it posted its highest monthly sales in 15 years.

 

The sharpest weapon in its arsenal is electric. The Proton e.MAS 7, a twin of the Geely Galaxy E5, was Malaysia’s bestselling EV through 2025. The e.MAS brand was the fastest in the country, to cross 20,000 electrified vehicle sales. This is under seven months. The cheaper e.MAS 5 pulled in more than 10,000 bookings within weeks of launch.

 

In 2025, China exported 8.32 million vehicles, its third straight year as the world’s largest car exporter. BYD alone sold 4.6 million vehicles globally, more than Ford.

 

To its credit, Perodua is not standing still. In December 2025, it launched the QV-E, billed as Malaysia’s first homegrown EV, developed for RM800 million with over 100 local engineers working on it and priced at RM80,000 with a battery subscription plan. And Perodua’s fundamentals remain formidable. It sold a record 359,904 vehicles in 2025, making it the second biggest carmaker in Asean by sales, behind only Toyota. The Bezza, Axia and Myvi still own the affordable end of the market, and no one matches its cost discipline.

 

But notice the irony. The company built on Japanese engineering had to develop its own EV largely from scratch, because its Japanese partner had little to offer. Daihatsu has no ready-made passenger EV for Perodua to borrow, while Proton simply picks from Geely’s shelf.

Malaysians are getting better cars at better prices than at any point in our history, and the fight for our ringgit is forcing both companies to improve.

 

Proton’s Geely partnership has also brought real industrial capacity, with Malaysia’s first dedicated EV plant opening in Tanjung Malim in September 2025, inside an Automotive High-Tech Valley meant to anchor an entire supply chain.

 

The lesson of Japan, South Korea and China themselves is that every great car industry started by borrowing someone else’s homework. The trick is graduating from assembling other people’s ideas to generating your own, and the QV-E, whatever its commercial fate, shows the ambition is alive.

 

So, watch the sales charts closely over the next 18 months. If Proton keeps growing at this pace, 2027 could bring something once unthinkable: a Chinese-engineered car dethroning a Japanese-engineered one as Malaysia’s favourite.

 

After a decade of a one-horse race, the battle for Malaysia’s driveways is finally worth watching again. And whichever badge takes the chequered flag, the Malaysian driver wins. But for the Malaysian car sector to win, we need a eco-system that has the design, engineering and production capabilities of a fully localised Malaysian car. After 40 plus years, these two national cars still require protection. That’s a shame. Surely after 40 years, you should be able to do your own production and export unless you are Hindustan Motors (India) producing the Ambassador – which is no longer available.

 

Reference:

Proton vs Perodua: and the winner is… the Malaysian driver, K. Kathirgugan, FMT,
26 August 2026

Shouldn’t Malaysians Say “Enough is Enough”?

 

In 2022, after Umno president was acquitted of 40 charges relating to the foreign visa system (VLN) contract, he declared: “I had faith in the judiciary ‘since day one’.” But when former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak’s SRC International case went through the appeals process, and with the Federal Court finally upholding his conviction and sentence, the tone changed. 

Najib was convicted by the High Court on July 28, 2020. On Dec 8, 2021, a three-member Court of Appeal panel chaired by Abdul Karim Abdul Jalil unanimously upheld his conviction and sentence. The other judges were Has Zanah Mehat and Vazeer Alam Mydin Meera. 

Source: https://www.psthatslife.com/when-enough-is-enough/ 

In August 2022, the Federal Court heard his final appeal. The five-judge bench was chaired by then-chief justice Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat. The other members were chief judge of Sabah and Sarawak Abang Iskandar Abang Hashim and senior judges P Nallini, Mary Lim Thiam Suan, and Zabidin Diah. It was an unanimous decision that the evidence led during the trial points overwhelmingly to guilt on all seven charges. 

“We demand (sic) that he be given justice in court. We demand that fair justice is given to Datuk Seri Najib,” Zahid thundered at the UMNO general assembly. The phrases “fair trial” and “justice” have been misused interchangeably ever since Najib was first charged in 2018. 

All this, despite Najib being described as a “national embarrassment” by the Court of Appeal, and despite then High Court judge Collin Lawrence Sequerah’s judgment in the 1MDB case. The judge described Najib’s plundering of state-owned 1MDB as graver than the acts of Attila the Hun, because his role in one of the world’s greatest financial scandals resulted in enormous debts of tens of billions of ringgit that generations of Malaysians will have to bear. In an 810-page written judgment, Sequerah said Najib had leveraged the vast powers bestowed on him by his “exalted positions” as prime minister, finance minister, and chairman of 1MDB’s board of advisers to enable the audacious theft at the strategic investment company. The scale of the 1MDB scandal involving Najib was so vast that it made “Attila the Hun look like a choirboy by comparison”. 

Yet, the Umno charade continues, as if Najib’s pardon - like other privileges for selected politicians - were an entitlement that lesser mortals should not question. Najib has not expressed regret or remorse; he has never apologised for his role in the losses suffered by us, the Malaysian taxpayers, who continue to pay for his excesses and his dealings with Low Taek Jho, better known as Jho Low. 

As of March 2023, the government had paid RM43.8 billion of 1MDB’s obligations, while a further RM9.7 billion remain outstanding, comprising RM5 billion in principal and RM4.7 billion in interest. Public discussion of accountability cannot be separated from the financial burden ultimately borne by the state and, by extension, taxpayers. Even after tens of billions of ringgit had been paid, substantial liabilities remained. 

The central question in any debate about clemency, pardon, or accountability is therefore not only whether a punishment has been served, but also how society weighs the magnitude of the financial consequences against principles of justice, responsibility, and public trust. Redemption is atoning for guilt, a fault, or a mistake. Najib has yet to admit wrongdoing or express remorse, despite the Federal Court affirming the guilty verdicts passed by the courts below in the SRC International case. 

And to a greater extent, many have refused to accept that Najib misused public funds, refusing to accept the adage - if you do the crime, you must do the time. But a clear message has to be sent: the larger the loss, the higher the threshold many citizens believe should apply when considering exceptional relief. And the higher the status, the more severe the punishment should be. Shouldn’t Malaysians say clearly “enough is enough”, especially at the coming GE16? 

Reference:

COMMENT | Malaysians have the right to say 'no' to Umno-style justice, R Nadeswaran, Malaysiakini, Sep 16, 2026

The Leaning Tower of PISA

 

The latest dismal performance of the country’s 15-year-olds in the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) results, released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently, reinforces this concern. 

The Pisa results show that the performance of Malaysia’s 15-year-olds has not improved and, in some areas, has regressed. Average scores in 2025 were lower than in 2022 for mathematics, while remaining broadly similar for reading and science – helped only by a decline in the overall OECD average. This is particularly concerning given the weak baseline in 2022, when scores in all three areas of assessment – mathematics, reading and science – fell below the global average, marking one of the most significant declines globally. Compared with 2018, student performance has deteriorated across all three areas.

 

Source:https://www.wikiimpact.com 

There is a tendency, rightly or wrongly, to draw comparisons between the number of students achieving “A” grades in the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) and Pisa outcomes. However, the two are not directly comparable. The SPM is a comprehensive national examination covering all 17-year-olds, whereas Pisa assesses a randomly selected sample of 15-year-olds. 

Those Malaysians who were in secondary school in the 1970s to the 1990s will point to what they perceive as grade inflation in the SPM examination. They may recall that it was much harder to score “A” grades then, with outstanding results typically comprising five to seven As – and only a small number of students achieving them. Today, such top scorers’ number in the thousands. 

In 2025, a total of 13,779 candidates, or 3.55% of SPM candidates, obtained “A” grades in all subjects, slightly lower than in 2024. Interestingly, the national average grade also improved to 4.42 last year from 4.49 in 2024 (the lower the score, the better the performance), while 94.3% of candidates qualified for certification. This has led many to question the apparent disconnect between SPM results and Pisa outcomes, as well as the broader quality of the education system, including at the tertiary level. 

Concerns have been raised about graduates’ proficiency in English, critical thinking abilities and overall aptitude. More worrying is the rise in the proportion of low-performing students.

According to the OECD, the share of students scoring below minimum proficiency levels has increased by 24 percentage points in mathematics, and by 10 percentage points each in reading and science. Overall, Malaysian students continue to score below the OECD average in mathematics, reading and science. In computational problem-solving, their mean score also falls short of the OECD average. Drilling down further, the scores tell a woeful tale, with Malaysian students’ proficiency continuing to lag behind the OECD average. 

Pisa measures performance across six proficiency levels, with higher levels indicating stronger mastery. Top performers are those in levels 5 and 6. Only 54% of Malaysian students attained level 2 or higher in science, compared with the OECD average of 74%. Just 0.5% reached levels 5 or 6, far below the OECD average of 7%. So, it can be assumed that the young scientists at the recent science challenge final represent this small top tier. The gap is even wider in mathematics. Only 35% of Malaysian students reached at least level 2 proficiency, compared with 65% across the OECD. A mere 0.6% were top performers, versus 8% for the OECD. 

Regionally, Malaysia also trails significantly in producing top performers. China bags the top spot with 54%, followed by Singapore (37%), Taiwan (32%), Macao (29%), South Korea (23%), Japan (22%) and Hong Kong (21%). 

Reading outcomes tell a similar story. Only 44% of Malaysian students achieved level 2 or higher, compared with the OECD average of 69%, while almost no students reached level 5 or above, against an OECD average of 6%. Many students still face difficulties with reading comprehension – the very foundation of all learning. 

Greater accountability for education spending is, therefore, essential. More importantly, it is time to question whether the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025 remains fit for purpose, or whether a return to fundamentals is needed – starting with the 3Rs of education (reading, writing and arithmetic). And hopefully we have a new, dynamic and pragmatic Minister of Education. 

Reference:

Malaysia’s learning curve is bending down, Fintan Ng, The Star, 12 Sep 2026