THE brain drain issue is a recurring subject in Malaysian public discourse. In the last parliamentary session alone, the matter has been brought up a few times.

Last Wednesday, Sibu MP Oscar Ling, drew bursts of laughter across social media when he used the words “longkang otak” – a direct translation of the phrase brain drain – to ask Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Federal Territories) Dr Zaliha Mustafa a question on the issue in the Dewan Rakyat session.

Zaliha corrected the former, saying that the correct phrase should be “hijrah cendekiawan”.

A day later, Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad, responding to a question from Kluang MP Wong Shu Qi, stated that some 2,445 nurses applied to work abroad last year and that his ministry was concerned about healthcare workers leaving to work abroad.

Two weeks ago, Dzulkefly answered a similar question from Arau MP Shahidan Kassim about the number of specialist doctors who had e abroad in the past 10 years.

Malaysia is currently an upper middle-income country, and it has been shown that countries in this bracket are particularly affected by the severity of brain drain.

In comparison, people from richer countries normally have less motivation to move abroad while people from poorer countries have less ability to move, as moving abroad costs a lot and not many people from poorer countries could afford it.

They are also less likely to have an education system that produces the highly-skilled talents that other countries need.

As such, an upper middle-income country like Malaysia, where its people are not rich enough to discount the possibility of leaving but wealthy enough to be able to afford to move to other countries and have the necessary skills, needs to formulate a strategy to deal with this problem properly.

This is of course not to say that there are no people emigrating away from wealthy countries.

Even the wealthiest country will have people wanting to move away for various reasons such as seeking adventure, liking the destination country, marrying a foreign spouse or other personal reasons.

But it is undeniable that, compared to their less affluent counterparts, high-income countries have the upper hand in terms of retaining talents.

One might ask, if the problem is that we are not rich enough, couldn’t we just march through the process of upgrading our economy and making ourselves a high-income nation?

The problem is that our process of becoming a high-income economy seems to have stalled in the last few years.

In March 2021, the World Bank released a report stating that Malaysia was likely to transition to a high-income economy between 2024 and 2028 though further reforms are required to achieve the goal. Malaysia’s Gross National Income (GNI) per capita at the time was US$11,200, only US$1,336 short of the high-income threshold of US$12,536.

However, according to World Bank’s latest data, Malaysia’s current GNI per capita is US$11,970 while the current threshold for high income is US$14,005.

The gap between our current GNI per capita and the threshold of a high-income country is now US$2,035, which is higher than when the World Bank report was written in 2021. Our government needs to study closely on why we are regressing on this front.

In particular, it’s time to consider whether our Foreign Domestic Investment (FDI) driven economy should be transformed into a more domestic consumption-based economy.

If we accept that we are not likely to get rich soon, or at least not to the level of richness that would sufficiently deter emigration, what could we do in the meantime to minimise the negative impact of brain drain?

In my humble opinion, we should look at what advantages we have that we could use to compete with higher income economies.

For example, we probably could not compete by offering better salaries and perks, but could we at least compete by providing a better work-life balance or a better welfare system?

Could we look into the implementation of a four-day work week, or not dismantle our healthcare system to the level of the United States?

Could we help our R&D personnel to take advantage of globalised networks to compensate for the lack of local resources?

These are all matters that we should seriously consider. – July 10, 2024.

* Rayner Sylvester Yeo is a member of Agora Society. He was born in Sabah and is currently residing in Kuala Lumpur. Having grown up in a mixed-ethnic, multi-faith family and spent his working life in public, private and non-profit sectors, he believes diversity is the spice of life.