KUALA LUMPUR, June 21 — The choice of women to stay home and take care of children should be considered a profession.

Statistics Department chief statistician Dr Mohd Uzir Mahidin said stay-at-home mothers or housewives played a different role compared to working mothers.

"It is high time the government came up with a mechanism to evaluate how housewives contribute to society and the economy,” he said.

"Women who have chosen to stay at home to develop human capital (the future generation) have an important task,” said Uzir when unveiling the 2016 National Economic Census yesterday.

"Despite the slow increase in the number of women entrepreneurs, from 19.2 per cent in 2010 to 20.3 per cent in 2015, this is positive progress as one in every five companies are currently owned by women.”

This representation, he said, did not reflect slow progress as long as women representation in the workforce stood at over 50 per cent. It is currently at 54.1 per cent.

According to data collated between 2010 and 2015, there are 10,000 companies owned by women opened annually, mostly in the service sector and manufacturing.

"We know of women equipped with tertiary education who have chosen to stay home to raise their children.

"They are sacrificing their careers for the country by investing in their children and raising them equipped with knowledge,” he said.

On statements that Malaysia is a failed state, Uzir said the data obtained from the census proved otherwise. It reflected positive economic growth of the country moving forward as a developed nation.

He said the dominance of the service sector shows that Malaysia is not a failed state.The service sector dominates 88.9 per cent of over 920,000 active companies.

Uzir said the service sector also remains the highest contributor in added value with 52.7 per cent in 2015, an increase of 1.7 per cent from 2010. 

"The manufacturing sector remains a major contributor to output value which reached RM1.1 trillion for the first time.

"If Malaysia was a failed state, then foreign investors would not want to invest here. The demand and growth in infrastructure also indicates we are heading in the right direction,” said Uzir.

Uzir said the government was developing a business demographic indicator to gauge the birth and death of companies in real time.

He said the business demographic could be used as an indicator of Malaysia’s economic growth, whereby he said new registrations would reflect a positive outlook and vice versa. 

"We hope to see the first draft of the proposal by next year and will be incorporating it into the next census in the next five years.

"We have now captured almost a million active establishments and we will continue updating the numbers. However, this data is not in real time and does not reflect the total number of companies in Malaysia,” he said.

The nationwide survey, which is carried out every five years, began in April last year and ended in November, recording data from 920,624 respondents .

The census results would be used as a benchmark to tabulate gross economic product as well as to identify new economic sectors and resources.

The announcement of all 24 results of the census would be done in stages, beginning this month.

* Editor's note: The print version of this story contained errors which have since been corrected here.