KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 8 ― Political research outfit Political Studies for Change (KPRU) has backed Pakatan Harapan’s (PH) administration pledge to create one million new jobs within its five-year term, saying the goal is achievable.

Based on its report on the matter, the think tank concluded that multiple policies and initiatives to create new jobs undertaken by PH government will exceed its pledge of creating one million new jobs.

In the report, KPRU also pointed out that the employment trend from 2013 to 2018 had increased by 1.23 million during the Barisan Nasional government.

This statistic is also an indicator that PH is able to achieve the same or more jobs to be created within their first five-year term as the federal government, with an average of 300,000 new jobs created per year.

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“This statistic indicated the vision to create one million jobs in the term of PH administration is workable, not an empty promise. 

“When we take a closer look at data from the day since PH took power in May 2018, the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) found the employment rate of the second quarter of 2018 reached 14.77 million and 15.16 million for the third quarter of 2019. The total employment increases around 390,000 people.

“Averagely, there is an increment of 78,000 employed people every quarter since PH was installed as Federal Government.  This increment trend led to a plausible forecast of the creation of 1.5 million job opportunities within five years, by the given increment rate.

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“Therefore, KPRU agrees with the plausibility to create one million jobs in five years based on the analysis of the previous trend in the employment statistics. In fact, if one million jobs are not feasible, what about the Barisan Nasional (BN) promises to generate three million job opportunities?” said the report.

The report was referring to a pledge made by Barisan Nasional to create three million jobs for youths in its GE14 election manifesto.

 

In the report, KPRU also notes the strong criticism towards PH, especially from the Opposition, that they will not be able to deliver the pledge.

The report also stated that the Pakatan administration has yet to clarified specifically on how they plan to create “jobs in the discipline of each and different ministry.”

However, KPRU reiterated in their report that the government is committed to fulling their pledge to create a million new jobs.

“However, we must recognise that there is a possibility of over-lapped job opportunities as announced by each and different ministry. The public projects and programs might involve several ministries that put the accurate differentiation of new job opportunities into a challenging circumstance,” said the report.

The research had compiled official data from the report released by the relevant ministries in 2019 and 2020.

Among the major initiatives done by Pakatan is the Malaysians@Work, which was announced in the 2020 budget where it plans to some 350,000 new jobs.

In Budget 2020, the government also announced an RM1 billion investment packaged incentives annually for five years to Fortune 500 companies and global unicorns in high technology, manufacturing, creative and new economic sectors, potentially creating another 150,000 high-quality jobs.