Stripped of the MRT and RAPID mega-projects, the capital investment per employee (CIPE) in ETP projects is a mere RM305,000. This is only about half the RM554,000 that the Malaysian Industrial Development Authority (MIDA) averaged in the last five years from 2006 to 2011 under business-as-usual (BAU) before PEMANDU came into being.
A higher CIPE is usually correlated with higher salaries, due to the higher levels of skills and productivity associated with working with more efficient machines and technology. However, based on CIPE, it seems that PEMANDU is causing a regression instead of progression in salaries!
The low CIPE of the ETP projects, on top of the massive 75,000 jobs lost that PEMANDU glossed over as ’recalibration’, is making one issue painfully evident. PEMANDU is carefully avoiding the topic, but the ETP is not, and will not provide sustainable high-income jobs that will transform the lives of the vast majority of Malaysians.
REFSA discusses this in detail in ‘Dissecting the ETP Annual Report: Part 5 – The EPPs do not seem to be creating high-income jobs‘.