Dzulkefly Ahmad – the _

Rules and regulations would become non-credible if it is unenforced enough. Smoking ban at eateries. Running the red light. Private vehicles on bus lanes. Illegal parking by the roads. We all have seen these cases frequently that violations are expected to be the norm.

In frustration, a person recently publicly tweeted Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad to complain about zero enforcement of the smoking ban. The Minister replied that the Ministry indeed enforced the bans and shared some statistics of people caught violating the rules. He shared that more than 96,000 citations were given, and 42,000 alone were linked to violations at eateries. So, technically, the Minister is right. There has been a non-zero enforcement. Yet, a non-zero is not sufficient.[1]

After all, what is the percentage of 42,000 caught violators to total violations?

The actual answer might be difficult to get to without a proper survey. But we can run a guesstimate. One 2018 paper suggests there were 5 million smokers in Malaysia.[2] Let us assume several things:

The 2024 figure is the same as suggested by the paper.
1% of the 5 million are regular violators.
These 1% visit a restaurant (mamak) at least once a month (12 times a year).
They violate the smoking ban during every visit.
There is no corruption.

If we agree these are reasonable assumptions (these assumptions all in all are very conservative, except maybe the no-corruption part), then the 42,000 citations (caught violations) would represent only 7% of total assumed violations (caught and uncaught). The 7% figure suggests a low rate of enforcement. The revealed preference suggests that if the 7% figure is right, then it is below the rate necessary to make the law credible.

But even if we reject these assumptions and reject that 7% guesstimate, there is also revealed preference at work here: the fact that violations keep happening suggests the actual ratio must be very low that many continue to ignore the regulation brazenly.

These smokers ignore the ban because they do not believe they would get caught. And if they do get caught at all, the cost they would suffer is low. This is true not for just the smoking violations, but other things as well.

The laws themselves are meaningless if people do not believe in it. It is the act of enforcing enough that make people believe certain laws are credible.

But enforcement is expensive. Enforcement has been funded and here is where there is a link between insufficient enforcement and the fiscal pressures the government faces. To put it differently, resources are scarce enough that funding has to be prioritized and not enough has been channeled to boost the ratio of citations/total violations.

I take this as yet another symptom of the government being underfunded, and a case of needing to raise taxation level in Malaysia from its current low levels.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

^[1] — Hi & Thanks Paul @paultantk Lest you missed these..lm attaching it here for you et al to peruse..for your ‘zero enforcement’ n ‘completely toothless’ law. [Dzulkefly Ahmad. X. Accessed March 31 2024]

^[2] — Approximately 5 million Malaysian adults (22.8%), aged 15 years and over, were current smokers. The prevalence of current smokers was significantly higher in males (43.0, 95%CI: 42.0-44.6) compared to females (1.4%, 95%CI: 1.0-1.8), as a whole and across all socio-demographic groups. The Chinese (14.2%, 95%CI: 12.7-15.9) and Indians (16.5%, 95%CI: 13.9-19.4) had a significantly lower prevalence of smoking compared to other ethnic groups. Adults aged 25- 44 years (28.3%, 95%CI: 26.9-29.8) reported the highest prevalence of smoking, but those with tertiary educational attainment (14.9%, 95%CI: 13.5-16.3) and those with an income level at the lowest (16.5%, 95%CI: 14.6-18.6) or highest (19.3%, 95%CI: 17.7- 21.1) quintile had significantly lower prevalence of smokers. On the other hand, the smoking prevalence was significantly higher among the self-employed workers (35.4%, 95%CI: 33.2-37.6) and those who worked in the private sector (31.7%, 95%CI: 29.8-33.6), compared to government servants, retirees and homemakers [Prevalence and factors associated with smoking among adults in Malaysia: Findings from the National Health and Morbidity Survey (NHMS) 2015. National Center for Biotechnology Information. National Library of Medicine. Accessed March 31 2024]

Institute for Policy Research, better known locally among restricted circles as IKD (Institut Kajian Dasar) organized a small forum on the New Economic Policy a couple of hours ago. As it turned out, the forum focused on the weaknesses of the New Economic Policy but throughout the forum, the most interesting point was raised by Dzulkefly Ahmad and later followed up by Khalid Jaafar.

Dzulkefly Ahmad, the director of PAS Research Centre, mentioned the phrase distributive justice. I quickly recognized this as another word for equitability. In my head, I was quick to point out that mainstream economics does not deal with equitability but rather, stresses on efficiency. Nevertheless, there is a mechanism to achieve a perceived efficient equitable point; the Second Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics provides for this. In layperson’s term, the theorem proves that any efficient outcome could be achieved through a lump-sum wealth redistribution. Through the new allocation of endowment, the new efficient outcome is attainable through market forces.

While I was thinking in technical term, Khalid Jaafar came up with a more meaningful question: who would be responsible for the redistribution of wealth?

My bias wants me to say the market. After deeper casual mental masturbation however, I am struggling to answer the question of how would or could the market reallocate individuals’ endowment?

The tougher questions are these: what is an economic efficient equitable outcome? Could the market recognize that efficient equitable outcome?

At 02:40, my eyes are heavy and my brain is shutting off.

Unlike me, all speakers — Rajah Rasiah of Universiti Malaya, Dzulkelfly Ahmad of PAS and Tony Pua of DAP — prefer the easier path which requires government intervention. That endowment reallocation is of course done through taxation.