Felda has a new building in downtown Kuala Lumpur. It is a pretty slick building. Whatever that says about the construction industry, I do not think it says anything too good enough private sector-led economy. Unscientific yes but the skyline of Kuala Lumpur says a lot about how supposedly private sector-led economy Malaysia is, given that Kuala Lumpur is the economic center of the country.<\/p>\n
Take a look at the skyline of Kuala Lumpur from a far. Apart from Felda, there are PNB, Tabung Haji and the Petronas Twin Towers. From where I live, these four buildings dominate the skyline. And then you can have CIMB and Maybank too. How about Telekom Malaysia? KL Tower? These do not include non-business related buildings like City Hall, BNM and EPF (while non-business, the EPF does influence the Malaysian equity market in a big way). How about the most political of it all, the UMNO building? \u00a0Not government, but for better or for worse, UMNO has a hand in it.<\/p>\n
Warisan Merdeka will take it place in some years to come, yet another building to dominate the skyline like how the Petronas Twin Towers do.<\/p>\n
These buildings symbolize what the Malaysia economy really is: government-driven.<\/p>\n
One might argue that there are many more private buildings that government and government-linked companies buildings around. True that but that does not mean the buildings of the latter do not dominate still.<\/p>\n
The sense of a government-led economy would have been more profound if the federal government had not move to Putrajaya more than a decade ago. But that is all symbolism. It does not change the fact that the government has a considerable say in the economy. Too big a say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Felda has a new building in downtown Kuala Lumpur. It is a pretty slick building. Whatever that says about the construction industry, I do not think it says anything too good enough private sector-led economy. Unscientific yes but the skyline of Kuala Lumpur says a lot about how supposedly private sector-led economy Malaysia is, given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[45,1040],"class_list":["post-10918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-kuala-lumpur","tag-private-sector"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10918"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10920,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10918\/revisions\/10920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}