Yogeesvaran, who is the former deputy director-general (Macro) of the Economic Planning Unit, said political stability and governance needed to be addressed, or it would impede economic recovery.

“If we don’t have political stability, we are going to lose recovery,” he said at this year’s Malaysia Economic Summit.

He explained that as political stability was closely related to coherence and consistency of policy, frequent changes in policy would result in dampened recovery.

“When we talk about governance, we are talking about transparency and the level of corruption, and whether real or perceived, it’s very important when you want to draw in domestic and, most importantly, foreign investment.”

He added that according to the last United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report on world investment, almost 80% of the total investments that came to Asean went to Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam.

“We (Malaysia) only got a single digit portion of the total investment. We are losing ground to other regional economies as far as attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) is concerned.”

He went on to stress the importance of FDI, as a large portion of the country’s growth over the past few decades was attributed to multinational corporations (MNC) venturing into new industries.

Ahmed Razman of the Putra Business School said there was a need for political stability so that existing action plans could be implemented.

“If we don’t have a stable government, we cannot execute things.”

He said the country already had a national agro-food policy, Dasar Agromakanan (DAN) 2.0, which was supposed to be launched two years ago but was delayed due to political instability.

“If you happen to read through all 589 pages, there are 77 action plans to address our food security, and we have already highlighted the problems that we are facing.

“Why have we not implemented them? With a stable government, we can simply proceed with the execution.”