Malaysia's top talent is fleeing to Singapore: Daniel Moss

Malaysia’s economy is cranking up after the pandemic. Land borders with Singapore have reopened, bringing in millions of visitors. Kuala Lumpur’s notorious traffic jams are back and shoppers are flocking to malls. The revival also has a rich irony: So many workers have left for better-paid jobs in the country’s wealthy southern neighbour that businesses are struggling to meet demand.

大流行后马来西亚的经济正在加速发展。与新加坡的陆地边界已重新开放，吸引了数百万游客。吉隆坡臭名昭著的交通拥堵又回来了，购物者涌向购物中心。复兴也具有极大的讽刺意味：如此多的工人已经离开该国富裕的南部邻国寻找薪水更高的工作，以至于企业难以满足需求。

From tourism to agriculture, an absence of staff is constraining the recovery. It’s also adding to deeper strains in an upper middle-income economy that was once a model for the developing world but has since suffered from a long-term slowdown in growth — one that started well before Covid-19. To graduate to the next tier of prosperous economies, Malaysia must staunch the flow of talented citizens abroad.

从旅游业到农业，缺乏工作人员正在限制复苏。这也加剧了中高收入经济体的更深层次的压力，该经济体曾经是发展中国家的典范，但此后一直遭受长期增长放缓的困扰——这种增长早在 Covid-19 之前就开始了。要进入下一个繁荣经济体，马来西亚必须阻止有才能的公民在国外的流动。

The nation’s ambition is to escape a middle income trap, where it is less affluent than Singapore, but doing better than neighbours like Indonesia and the Philippines. It’s one thing to bring in labour for agriculture, construction and low-to-mid-tier manufacturing. But Malaysia faces a double whammy: The low-skilled workforce is depleted because of a hiring freeze and border closures during Covid-19, but high-skilled people are likely to resume their exodus.

这个国家的雄心是摆脱中等收入陷阱，它不如新加坡富裕，但比印度尼西亚和菲律宾等邻国做得更好。为农业、建筑和中低端制造业引进劳动力是一回事。但是马来西亚面临双重打击：由于在 Covid-19 期间招聘冻结和边境关闭，低技能劳动力已经枯竭，但高技能劳动力可能会继续外流。

Malaysia is slowly starting to ease its restraints on hiring. To offset the crunch in the meantime, employers have been engaging locals in work they often shunned: “3D jobs” that are dirty, dangerous and difficult. In the Cameron Highlands, where trucks wait to drive to Singapore with tomatoes, peppers, onions and cucumbers, farmer Louis Lau is using Malaysians for labour once sought by foreigners. “We are facing a big problem,” he told me. Other sectors don’t have the same flexibility. In Penang on the northwest coast, scores of ships that would normally be put to sea for at least a week sit dockside, thanks to a dearth of migrant workers.

马来西亚正慢慢开始放松对招聘的限制。与此同时，为了抵消紧缩，雇主一直在让当地人从事他们经常回避的工作：肮脏、危险和困难的“3D工作”。在金马伦高原，卡车等待着将西红柿、辣椒、洋葱和黄瓜开往新加坡，农民路易斯刘正在使用马来西亚人作为曾经受到外国人追捧的劳动力。“我们正面临一个大问题，”他告诉我。其他部门没有同样的灵活性。在西北海岸的槟城，由于缺乏移民工人，数十艘通常会出海至少一周的船只停在码头边。 

At the other end of the country, hoteliers in Johor bemoan the gravitational pull of Singapore. The Star newspaper highlighted the saga on its front page recently, with complaints from executives about the scarcity of foreign labour needed to clean rooms, handle check-ins and keep the lights on. “It is challenging for hotels here to compete with employers in Singapore, as locals can be paid three times higher for doing similar jobs,” Suhairi Hashim, director of Tourism Johor, told The Star. 

在该国的另一端，柔佛的酒店经营者为新加坡的引力而哀叹。《星报》最近在其头版上强调了这一传奇故事，高管们抱怨说打扫房间、办理入住手续和保持照明所需的外国劳动力稀缺。柔佛旅游局局长Suhairi Hashim告诉《星报》：“这里的酒店要与新加坡的雇主竞争是一项挑战，因为当地人从事类似工作的报酬可能高出三倍。   ”

After lobbying hard for the bridge links with Singapore to reopen, Johor businesses now find they barely have enough people to unbolt the latch. While Malaysian employers claim the city-state — where GDP per person is among the highest in the world — is sucking in talent, Singapore is suffering a shortfall of its own that sent the unemployment rate to 2.2%.

在努力游说与新加坡的桥梁重新开放之后，柔佛企业现在发现他们几乎没有足够的人来解开闩锁。虽然马来西亚雇主声称这个城市国家 - 人均国内生产总值是世界上最高的国家之一 - 正在吸纳人才，但新加坡正遭受其自身的短缺，导致失业率达到 2.2%。

The Singapore government, which also imposed tough border controls during Covid, is trying to ease the backlog. Ministers are urging businesses to hire locals. Dependence on imported labour has become a touchy subject over the past decade, especially after a deep recession in 2020 led to a rare electoral setback for the ruling party. While the foreign workforce has receded over the past two years, it represents more than 20% of the population.

新加坡政府也在 Covid 期间实施了严格的边境管制，正试图缓解积压。部长们正在敦促企业雇用当地人。在过去十年中，对进口劳动力的依赖已成为一个敏感话题，尤其是在 2020 年的严重衰退导致执政党在选举中遭遇罕见挫折之后。虽然外国劳动力在过去两年中有所减少，但它代表了超过 20% 的人口。

Malaysia and Singapore, joined for two tumultuous years in the 1960s, will always be linked economically. Both, in their own way, are increasingly ambivalent about foreign workers. That does little to diminish their need. An aging Malaysia risks stagnating before growing rich. It needs a vibrant employment scene to avoid that fate. Singapore, for all its prowess as a global business center, still needs contractors, bus drivers, construction workers and nurses.  

马来西亚和新加坡在 1960 年代加入了两个动荡的岁月，将永远在经济上联系在一起。两者都以自己的方式对外国工人越来越矛盾。这并没有减少他们的需求。老龄化的马来西亚有可能在致富之前停滞不前。它需要一个充满活力的就业环境来避免这种命运。新加坡虽然拥有作为全球商业中心的所有实力，但仍然需要承包商、巴士司机、建筑工人和护士。  

Of the two nations, Malaysia’s challenges appear greater. It faces a brain — and brawn — drain, driven by hard-to-extinguish racial preferences that favour ethnic Malays at the expense of minorities. “A significant share of the country’s most educated and skilled citizens leave the country for lack of opportunities,” according to a World Bank report last year that scrutinized the country’s progress toward becoming a high-income country, a goal considered likely to be attained between 2024 and 2028. One-third of emigrants were highly skilled, accounting for about 20% of the college-educated domestic population.

在这两个国家中，马来西亚的挑战似乎更大。它面临着大脑和体力的流失，这是由难以消除的种族偏好驱动的，这些偏好以牺牲少数族裔为代价偏爱马来人。“该国受教育程度最高、技术最熟练的公民中有很大一部分因缺乏机会而离开该国，”根据世界银行去年的一份报告，该报告审查了该国在成为高收入国家方面取得的进展，这一目标被认为可能在2024 年和 2028 年。三分之一的移民具有高技能，约占受过大学教育的国内人口的 20%。

Encouraging people to stay will require Malaysia loosen some of the rigidities that have stymied business activity. A plethora of state-backed firms and nominally private companies run by people close to the government have tentacles in almost every sector, which mitigates against competition. State enterprises tend to be used as national piggy banks to finance politically desirable projects and undertakings that contribute little to the economy’s overall dynamism. Suffice it to say, not exactly aspirational for young graduates. 

鼓励人们留下来需要马来西亚放松一些阻碍商业活动的僵化。大量由政府支持的公司和名义上由与政府关系密切的人经营的私营公司几乎在每个领域都有触角，这减轻了竞争。国有企业往往被用作国家存钱罐，为政治上理想的项目和事业提供资金，这些项目和事业对经济的整体活力贡献甚微。可以说，对于年轻的毕业生来说，这并不完全是理想的。 

Foreign workers in Malaysia tend to be low-skilled; relatively few have finished high school. They began filling gaps that opened up in the labour market decades ago, especially manufacturing, and comprised about 15% of the workforce prior to the pandemic, according to the Bank. (There’s also a large, but hard to quantify, population of undocumented laborers.)

马来西亚的外籍工人往往技能低下；高中毕业的人相对较少。据世行称，他们开始填补几十年前劳动力市场出现的空缺，尤其是制造业，在大流行之前他们占劳动力的 15% 左右。（还有大量但难以量化的无证劳工。）

Malaysia has long aspired to join the ranks of advanced economies and proudly paraded some of the baubles of such status: a domestic auto industry, the world’s tallest building and so on. It would do well to focus on less jazzy but vital components of success, like a labor market that can drive development in coming decades, not a relic of the go-go years of the late twentieth century.

马来西亚长期以来一直渴望加入发达经济体的行列，并自豪地展示了这种地位的一些小玩意：国内汽车工业、世界第一高楼等等。最好把注意力集中在成功的不那么浮夸但至关重要的组成部分上，比如可以在未来几十年推动发展的劳动力市场，而不是二十世纪后期的繁荣时期的遗迹。