IAF Malaysia

IAF Seminar on Promoting Entrepreneurship and Opening Markets by Muhammad Adli

Freedom is a word comes from the same root as a friend, an Indo-European word that meant "dear" or "beloved." It involved a connection to other free people by bonds of kinship or affection. Throughout my two weeks in Gummersbach, Germany, I finally feel what freedom means. It is an invaluable experience that I will remember my whole life because I met so many young and talented leaders across the world. Despite the diversity that we have such as different culture, different language, and different religion, we still shared a universal value; Freedom.

As an economist, the seminar on promoting entrepreneurship and open markets help me to develop my critical mind to debate regarding free market and entrepreneurship in Malaysia. To develop entrepreneurship in Malaysia, several measures and opinion were presented during the seminar. First, the education system needs to play a role. Entrepreneurship should be nurtured from the early age of school, and once it is well cherished in early education, the more significant entrepreneur will be born and ultimately will help Malaysian economy to flourish. Second, government regulation needs to be business-friendly. Few argument to promote business-friendly rule is to make the regulation simple and widely accepted. Besides, transparency and cost efficiency also essential to make any provision become a business-friendly regulation. Third, good infrastructure will compliment entrepreneur and help it to grow. One of the vital infrastructures to have is a good transportation system. Fourth, there must be a political will to pursue entrepreneurship in Malaysia. The government need to play some role here by preventing the conflict of interest between politics and entrepreneurship. There are several cases brought up during the seminar that some countries have a politician who monopolises an industry and gains excessive profit from it.

Furthermore, this seminar taught me how to analyse policy from the open market point of view. The policy analysis starts from detecting the root of the problem. Every problem in a country must have its source. To come out with a valid policy, an economist needs to analyse it critically and understand what the problem is. Then, relevant stakeholders need to sit together and go through a process call creativity. Estimation and assumption are vital for this process where it will help to generate options and alternatives for policy recommendations. After all the proposal being a list out, a decision needs to be made. The decision maker needs to take the right decision in choosing what is best for the country. The implementation process will be the last part where it needs to have excellent communication strategy and continuous evaluation of the selected policy.

Professor Dr Julian shared with us fascinating policy-making tools. He introduced policy bingo to be used when an encounter with alternatives and options for public policy to tackle a single problem. Policy bingo is a great tool to make a critical analysis in choosing which public policy is the best for given scenario. Also, policy instrument contains various force intensity. The higher force intensity requires by a policy will be a policy that involves laws, whereas a lower force intensity will be a policy that includes media and communication. Having these in mind, as an economist, we should not be strict ourselves to choose policy recommendation that only in line with libertarian principles, but we also need to be critical enough to look at other policy recommendation from different tenets given our limited knowledge and incomplete information.

Reality is complicated, and an economist will be unable to solve all the problem in the world. The most important lesson I learnt from this seminar is that as a libertarian thinker, we need always to be critical, be open, and respect each other. I adopt these values after interacting with all the libertarian thinker across the world from the seminar. My thanks will not be enough to FNF for choosing me to attend this workshop, but I will always value all the lessons I learnt from the seminar and promise myself to utilise it and make my country a better place to live.