Malaysian Brain Drain: Damn you don’t!
Can there be positive sides to the brain drain? Perhaps.
However, not at the scale and the stage as experienced by Malaysia and given its political and governance setup.
In the earlier article "Malaysian Brain Drain – Don’t go chasing waterfallsstanding at around 2.1 million in 2020, we can easily picture how the outflow remittance from Malaysia can quickly negate the positive effect of remittance by Malaysian migrants.
On top of that, any negligible positive effect will be further offset by the brain drain’s profound negative impact on the country’s industry and economy, which has a weakening impact on Ringgit.
When people of the highest productive and intellectual potential leave the country in great numbers, that country will find it more challenging to maintain a high intellectual and academic standard as these individuals are the vital driving force to create a more educated and professional society, cultivate and develop other talents.
Therefore, this dynamic will create a country’s starvation of talent replacement and further shrink national aggregate creative potential, making the country lose its competitive edge to other more developed nations and slowing down its development and industrialisation.
Besides that, persistent highly skilled workers shortage negatively impacts the availability of complementary skilled workers, less-skilled workers, entrepreneurs, and capital providers.
After all, it is the brightest, highly skilled individuals who create new business opportunities in the economy at pace with global industrial development.
At the same time, foreign direct investments are always hungry for home economies whose industries are densely infused with professional and highly skilled individuals, especially in tech as of the latest trend.
The need for a highly skilled tech-savvy workforce will only increase in the current, and future global job market as the world is forging ahead with the Industrial Revolution 4.0 (4IR) and soon 5.0 (5IR).
A deficient pool of highly skilled individuals who, among other things, are the key creators of start-ups and a thriving digital ecosystem in the economy significantly shrinks the country’s potential to attract foreign direct investment and, therefore, further economic development.
All the above have a devastating impact on the brain drain’s home currency, and this fundamental incessant weakness is what we see in Ringgit Malaysia, especially since 2015.
Rise of remote working
Perhaps, remote working and digitalisation could be a positive trend in addressing the talent shortage due to brain drain? The pandemic has shown us a potential for a hybrid model of remote working, but it might be somewhat limited.
A recent survey by McKinsey of 800 corporate executives worldwide and across all industry sectors found that the potential for remote work, although existent and likely to stay, is highly concentrated among highly-skilled, highly educated workers in a handful of industries, occupations, and geographies.
We need to factor in two aspects while evaluating the potential for remote working.
First is the theoretical potential for work to be done remotely determined by the extent to which there are tasks that require on-site physical presence, use of specialised machinery or equipment or closer, face-to-face, collaboration etc.
The second is effective potential or how much more effectively the work is done remotely as opposed to on-site presence. Using the above two variables, the McKinsey, for example, found that among the occupations that have the highest potential for remote work are: