Category: Society

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Economics Society

[2952] When did dates become popular among Muslim Malaysians?

Dates now feel ubiquitous on Ramadan dinner tables among the Malay (and the wider Muslim Malaysian) community. Not only that, more often than not, they break fast with the fruits first.

Just the other day, somebody spotted me breaking my fast with something else (a glass of water), and the person commented how unusual my behavior was.

I found that comment very peculiar. Contrary the person’s assertion, I feel date-eating had never been normal in Malaysia. I remember a time when dates were not even at all popular. It was not even available in the Malaysian mass market easily unlike now. The Yusuf Taiyoob trend, in particular, is really a recent phenomenon appearing in the early 2010s.

I myself first tasted dates not in Malaysia, but at a mosque in the United States in the early 2000s. There was a large Arab community—Iraqis, likely due to the Gulf Wars—and they loved their dates.

That comment made me wonder, how and when did dates start to become popular?

I know how it became popular: many would tell you it is religiously preferable to break fast with fresh dates. It is sunnah, which means extra pahala, or merit for those practicing it. And during Ramadan, Mulims believe everything good has a big multiplier assigned to it, unlike normal times when one good deed is considered one. Do not ask me about how the scorecard works.

So when?

I figured, the best way to know when dates became popular in Malaysia, and to prove whether I was right (that is mass date consumption being a relatively recent phenomenon in Malaysia), is to look at trade data over the years.

Here, two public databases are helpful. First, the International Trade Center, a body under both the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. Second, the UN Comtrade Database. Unfortunately, the best I could get was data all the way back from 1989.

So, when did dates first becoming popular in Malaysia (within the confines of Ramadan)?

I will let the graph talk.

The chart suggests date consumption grew in popularity (within its own context) over time. More supply means more could consume it: at the very least, date import volume grew at a faster rate than population growth.

Specifically, 1989 date imports were approximately 440 g/person. It rose to 480 g/person in 2000. An increase, but not too much. But it surge to 640 g/person in 2010 and then 700 g/person in 2020. There was a big jump between 2000 and 2010. I think that says something.

Things changed some time in the 2000s or the 2010s, which coincided with the rise of Tunisia as an exporter to Malaysia. Prior to that event, China, Iran and Egypt were the biggest suppliers. Both China and Egypt have fallen off the rung since the last decade.

With that, I think I can say in the 1990s, it was not that popular. That justifies my experience. It is not me that is unusual. It is the community that has changed.

I also suspect date consumption was popular among rich Malays first, way way before. The culture became popular with masses later partly due to religious exhortation/advisory (sunnah) and a version of conspicuous consumption at work: a Veblenian way of saying rich religious people eat it, and if I eat it, I would be seen as a rich religious person too. This is probably harder to prove.

Finally, it is good to put the rising popularity of dates into context. These date imports are small compared to other (foreign) fruits. For instance, nearly 170,000MT oranges (citruses really), 150,000MT apples and 50,000MT grapes and the likes were imported in 2020. Compare that to the 2020 dates imports of 22,500MT.

Still, 2020 date imports were bigger than bananas. But Malaysians do grow bananas locally. So, it is not a proper comparison.

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Liberty Politics & government Society

[2950] Too tame for our own good

Many things could describe the past two separate years that merged into one. Here, I would describe it as the taming of our society. The fire that powered many before was doused by shocks and disappointments of February 2020 along with all the political development that followed. This broke the heart of many.

And if there were still beating heart fighting on the political front, the pandemic that flared up soon after broke the body of many. The crisis and its mismanagement brought debilitating economic effects that forced many to switch attention away politics (politics here is not the narrowly defined partisan-party politics, but one about governance and the overall organization of society) to that of personal livelihood. Many died along the way.

Malaysian society as it was before the pandemic was mostly too polite for our own good, but the bludgeons needed to fight the pandemic turned that politeness into utter submission. There were noise and protests against the manner government regulation was applied incompetently. Some went to the streets. But those noise and protests were nothing compared to the years before. During the pandemic, far too few could, or willing to go to the ground, divided out of fear of getting infected, or the need to work at a time when unemployment was soaring, furloughing was the talks of the town, and wages were cut down significantly.

The foundation which the Muhyiddin government stood on was shaky soon after its undemocratic formation, but it stood for so long because any anger was contained by fear, or deference of power. But the ember-like anger burnt further and when it appeared a fire was about to lit—even patience among the polite has its limits—the irresponsible government played poker: they raised the stakes by declaring emergency. The stakes were raised to the point the polite did not dare challenge it too fiercely. Or they were too tired, and hapless.

The subsequent government under Ismail Sabri lowered the temperature for a while but the incompetence remained. That same incompetence was for all to see during the recent great floods across the peninsula. The further loss of life and property raised the political temperature yet again. The politics of race and religion showed it was all meaningless in the face of incompetence, so much so that this administration that largely has the same Cabinet members who previously prided itself as a Malay-Muslim government, has stopped marketing itself as one.

Amid the troubles faced by the general public, yet another scandal is erupting in the public first involving the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, and as national crisis tends to pull other public institutions into the ditch (1MDB was one such case but on a grander scale), later the Securities Commission. A good institutional set-up would have contained it. This government prefers to drag everything down, for their benefits, at the expense of the country. All that highlights how institutional reforms achieved due to the 2018 General Election was fragile and needed nurturing, and how the events of February 2020 undid the good work. The message before had always been reforms took time, but few imagined there would be so big a digression happening so soon.

The digression is happening because we have been too polite, too tame amid assaults over our democratic institutions. It is time to be not so tame and fight.

I would like to end this post by reproducing Usman Awang’s Sepatah Kata:

Sebuah perkataan yang paling ditakuti
Yang tradisional sekali
Untuk bangsa kita yang pemalu.
Sekarang kata ini kuajarkan pada anakku:
Kau harus jadi manusia kurangajar
Untuk tidak mewarisi malu ayahmu.
Lihat petani-petani yang kurangajar
Memiliki tanah dengan caranya
Sebelumnya mereka tak punya apa
Kerana ajaran malu dari bangsanya.
Suatu bangsa tidak menjadi besar
Tanpa memiliki sifat kurangajar.

Categories
Politics & government Society

[2939] A unity government is a chance to rebuild trust among Malaysians

I prefer Pakatan Harapan to be the federal government. The 2018 general election gave the coalition the democratic mandate to be so, and there are plenty of reforms left to the completed. I know many are disappointed with the pace of reforms under the previous Pakatan government, as well as the incessant infighting. But as far as reforms are concerned, it is a long term project. It definitely cannot be done within less than two years. To expect so is naïve and unrealistic.

But my preference is an ideal, which must face the unattractive options in the real world. Realistically, only an election would reshuffle the deck, and allow Malaysia to start afresh. But a general election is out of the question for now. We have to live with our bad hands, instead of insisting of holding the cards that we do not have.

The red line

The likeliest of all options on the table seems to suggest Umno back at the driving seat. Meanwhile, Pakatan lacks the seats to form the government, and an earlier option of that happening one involving working with the criminals of 1MDB. Both options push up the possibilities of 1MDB criminals and their collaborators escaping justice. That is the red line for me.

Yet, Umno’s road to the Prime Minister’s Office is not as smooth as initially expected, with Bersatu imposing conditions, which dissatisfied the Agong. That happened today or yesterday. The condition Bersatu imposes is the same red line I have: no Najib and his merrymen.

Given the political impasse (and before it gets solved with Najib as part of the power broker), the anti-1MDB force from Pakatan and all other sides should come together as a unity government. That unity government would have access to the best talent among the 220 Members of Parliament (there are few despite the big number) while locking out 1MDB men from power.

The additional benefit of unity government is a chance to rebuild trust among Malaysians, which is the reason I am writing this post.

Political elites, groups and values

When we discuss contemporary Malaysian politics, inevitably there will be a charge, with a resignation tone, that the political elites are serving their interest alone.

That is hard to deny, but it is an incomplete assessment of the situation. The truth is, the political elites do represent groups holding on to certain values. We live in a representative democracy, however imperfect it is.

These values differ across groups: upper middle-class urbanites in general hold on to certain values (and interests) they do not share with low-income Malaysians. There are other dimensions to consider: religion, ethnicity, geography, class, etc.

So, political elites are manifestation of the masses.

Distrust among us

We are at the point where trust between these groups is low. It has been low for a long time, and it interacts with other factors like our trsut in our institutions. The trust deficit in our institutions, I would argue, is partly due to lack of trust among us (I would like to add that I am writing a book and a chapter of the book explains this is greater detail).

There is a metric we could use to understand the state of trust in our society. The World Values Survey has a set of questions assessing trust level in a society, and it has been measuring Malaysian level since the 2000s. Well, three times: 2006, 2012 and 2018.

One out of several relevant questions has it, “would you say most people can be trusted?”

The question approximates trust level in Malaysia. In 2006 and 2012, about 9% of Malaysian respondents answered yes in both years. In 2018, it rose to 20% but there is every reason to believe post-election euphoria had a role in pushing the rate up. Regardless, the suddent jump, that is a pretty low percentage. In other countries as recorded in the 2018 edition, the rates typically fell in the 30%-60% range. In Thailand, 29%. In Singapore, 34%. In Japan, 34% too. In the United States, 37%. In Sweden, 63%.

There are of course other countries with even lower trust than Malaysia, but that should not be our goal.

An avenue to rebuild trust

With that in mind, and that the political elites (more specifically, Members of Parliament) representing groups of different values, a unity government here is chance to bridge the gap between different Malaysian groups.

Theoretically, a unity government should bring about a more cooperative environment to groups at loggerheads.

Yet, I am under no illusion such unity government would work in such a way. The gap seems wide that it that building a bridge sounds like a hopeless exercise. Yet, we have to at least try to rebuild that trust. And a unity government provides such opportunity under a democratic system, however low the odds are.

Categories
Economics Education Society

[2931] If affirmative action is to end in Malaysia, spending on public service has to increase

Discussions on affirmative action in Malaysia have never gone away but interest in it has increased in recent weeks. The first exciting interest in the topic was Hwok-Aun Lee’s book Affirmative Action in Malaysia and South Africa: Preference for Parity. I have not got my hands on the book (I hope to buy it soon), but I listened in to one of Lee’s webinar on the book and the subject earlier this year. Most recently, is Nazir Razak stating the New Economic Policy—Malaysia’s affirmative action—no longer works.

My thinking of affirmative action has softened over the year. Softened in the sense that while in the past I think I could be labeled as anti-NEP, I have adopted a show-me-the-result position. In fact, I have concluded there has to be a balance between economic and social imperatives. As a relevant side note, I am writing a book (a never-ending project) and in a segment of it, I outlined why I thought NEP might have a role in created a shared identity in Malaysia (perhaps Bangsa Malaysia as a shorthand for this) for a short while in the 1990s. It was a decade or two-long process coupled with rapid industrialization and globalization, that was unraveled during the late-1990s Asian Financial Crisis and later, China’s entrance into the global marketplace. My current thinking is that, though NEP-styled affirmative action worked in the 1970s and the 1980s (dare I say the 1990s despite its official expiry?) situation in the 2020s have changed dramatically that the way Malaysia does it affirmative action need to be rethought. It requires a rethinking because NEP did not work in isolation during the years and the factors (high growth and absence of China) that made NEP work are no longer present today.

Last week, I somehow got pulled into a Clubhouse discussion about NEP where Nazir Razak stood on a soapbox. Near the end, riding on an acquittance’s train of thought, if I remember correctly, Malaysia needs to invest in its public services more. I would like to clarify and expand that idea further.

If affirmative action is to end, then I think it is imperative that public service be expanded further. This is not to say the public service expansion and affirmative action are mutually exclusive. But it is probably good to understand that most beneficiaries of affirmative action probably rely on public service more than others. Removing affirmative action would likely require expansion in other parts of government in order to maintain the beneficiaries’ general welfare.

Here, the maintenance of general welfare is importance for social stability, which in turn is crucial to creating the environment for long-term economic growth, which itself is important to the maintenance of welfare. It is a loop.

By public service, I refer specifically to public education and public health system. By expansion, I mean by making it more accessible cheaply at a higher quality and while this may sound fluffy, I think the best proxy to this is government spending in these areas.

And Malaysia lags in terms of public spending in these two areas when compared to other countries. I have written a short advocacy paper on this matter under REFSA earlier and you can access it here.

A brief look at the World Bank database containing data from most countries will show that Malaysia is a middling when it comes to government spending in education relative to its GDP, while under-spends in public health services.

Malaysia’s government spending on education and health relative to nominal GDP

Malaysia’s 2018 government spending on health was 1.9% of GDP and this compares badly with upper-middle income countries’ average of 3.2%.[1] Malaysia does better in public education, spending 4.7% of GDP in 2017, versus upper-middle income average of 4.1% in the same year (year 2017 and 2018 are chosen because those are the latest year available for year-to-year comparison between Malaysia and upper-middle income average).[2]

So, if ever affirmative action, or NEP in whatever form it persists now, is to be dismantled, I feel is it crucial to boost public spending in government services. Boost spending alone, of course, is not enough. How you spend it matters too.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — Domestic general government health expenditure (% of GDP). Open Data. World Bank. Accessed April 7 2021.
[2] — Government expenditure on education, total (% of GDP). Open Data. World Bank. Accessed April 7 2021.

Categories
Economics Society

[2930] The biggest losers in this recession: the young

All recessions have its losers and to claim so is to state the obvious. It is more interesting to know who the losers are. Data from the Department of Statistics shows that the biggest losers in this recession are the young.

From the chart below, it is quite clear the job market for 35 years old and younger is doing badly relative to the market for older cohorts:

The chart is drawn by comparing total employment by age for each quarter relative to a pre-pandemic benchmark. In this case the benchmark is the final quarter of 2019, the last quarter before the pandemic. To illustrate:

  • there were 31,800 fewer employed persons among 15-24 years olds in the first quarter of 2020, relative to the last quarter of 2019
  • there were 202,600 fewer employed persons among 15-24 years olds in the second quarter of 2020, relative to the last quarter of 2019

So, if the number goes down, then it is bad because it shows fewer people are employed relative to the benchmark. If the number goes up, then it is good because it shows more people employed.

The data is from the Quarterly Report of Labour Force Survey. The 2020 fourth quarter report, which is the latest report, was released on February 8 2020.

Increased underemployment among younger cohorts

The change in total employment does not indicate change in employment quality. Here, I am referring to underemployment. Once again, the young are the most badly affected:Unlike in the first chart, an increase here suggests more people working less than 30 hours per week, which could be considered as a definition of underemployment (there are other underemployment definitions). They work less than 30 hours because they are likely unable to work fulltime. Therefore, an increase in this chart points to a worsening situation.

This is relevant because a person is considered employed in official statistics if he or she works for at least an hour per week. As you can see, it is a loose definition. During normal times, it is alright to use it because it works. But the situation we are in are quite abnormal and it challenges our traditional definitions.