The clock is ticking on the NEAC

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 16 — The National Economic Advisory Council (NEAC) was set up by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak to articulate new economic strategies for Malaysia, to enable the country to dust off its old export-oriented growth model and evolve into a high-income economy that would be underpinned by a vibrant services sector.

Lest we forget, it was also a reaction to the global financial crisis, which plunged almost every country on the planet into recession.

In late May, Tan Sri Amirsham A.Aziz (picture), former chairman of Maybank and an ex-minister of the Economic Planning Unit, was appointed its chairman, with the privileges of a minister thrown in. It took a further two months to appoint the NEAC's nine “experts”.

It's been almost five months now and precious little is known about what conclusions, if any, the NEAC has reached.

Compare this to the sense of urgency the NEAC's predecessor — the one set up by former premier Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad in January 1998 under Tun Daim Zainuddin — possessed.

To be sure, the NEAC established then was faced with the Asian financial crisis with a tumbling ringgit and a free-falling stock market. Given the circumstances, it acted with considerable dispatch.

By June, it had established Danaharta as an overall asset manager and final purchaser of bad debt of the books of troubled banks. Danaharta is now acknowledged globally as a good way to deal with a banking crisis.

By July — six months after its inception — the NEAC had come out with a detailed blueprint — the National Economic Recovery Plan — which presented six separate areas of action to be taken to deal with the crisis.

The NEAC proposed stimulus packages and regularly came out with bimonthly, even biweekly, Economic Update newsletters for key decision makers. In addition, it did six separate studies into sectors — from tourism and education to services and transport — that it felt deserved more attention from government.

It did not operate in a vacuum either, consulting with various industry and business groups — both local and foreign. At one point, even economic journalists working for the foreign press were invited to present their views.

Indeed, one would be hard-pressed not to believe that the NEAC was crucial to weathering the storm of 1998.

What is known about its successor is precious little. There has been scant press coverage, except for a little news item that said the council was planning a study tour of Korea to observe first-hand how that nation evolved into the high-income country that it is now.

A study tour? Surely, this cannot be the best the NEAC and its much-vaunted panel of experts can come up with. There are any number of books describing the miracle of Asia's tiger economies and the NEAC will probably get more bang for its buck, for these books invariably aren't restricted to Korea but include Singapore and Taiwan as well.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the NEAC. In his dialogue at the Apec Summit, Najib talked about having a new economic model by the end of the year. That's just two months away.

In addition, the country's civil servants have started work on the 11th Malaysia Plan. It cannot possibly exclude Malaysia's new growth model. — Business Times Singapore