Housing policy reforms can help break poverty cycle, say economists
The co-authors of a book on urban poverty say providing homes to the poor does not allow for social mobility.
PETALING JAYA: Reforming the government’s housing policy can support efforts to tackle urban poverty, say two economists.
Center for Market Education CEO, Carmelo Ferlito, said there was too much focus on home ownership currently, with Putrajaya providing homes to the poor in locations that did not allow for social mobility, that is, “the ability to escape poverty”.
Instead, he said, poorer folk could be relocated to environments and conditions that would give them better access to earning the resources they believed they required.
“Rather than providing homes to the poor, the government should focus on rent support schemes that will move the poor away from ‘ghetto’ areas to where better job opportunities are available,” he said.
Ferlito was speaking at the launch of a book titled “Assessing and Addressing Urban Poverty in Malaysia – Social Mobility Through Entrepreneurship”. The book is co-authored by Ferlito and Bait Al-Amanah research director Benedict Weerasena.
Weerasena said there was a lot of room for improvement when it came to social mobility in Malaysia, adding that the inadequacy of social protection schemes could trap more households in poverty in the event of an economic shock.
Compared with the rural poor, he said the urban poor bore the brunt of the pandemic, due to widespread commercial closure that impacted informal business activity in the cities and the inability to transition to remote working arrangements.
Ferlito said their book emphasised on how to promote social mobility through entrepreneurship, adding that encouraging the latter among the urban poor required institutional and educational reforms.
“We need institutions that promote liberty and respect for property rights and the rule of law,” he said, adding that Malaysia was still a “long way” off in fighting corruption.
Malaysia’s education system also needed to give greater value to humanist disciplines such as history and philosophy to promote critical thinking, which he said was fundamental for entrepreneurship.
Other policy reforms highlighted in the book include the liberalisation of the labour market to provide a wider Asean job market that would support Malaysian talents, and also on improving access to credit.
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The book launch was attended by the Belgian ambassador-designate to Malaysia, Peter Van Acker, and Bait Al-Amanah founding director Abdul Razak Ahmad.