KUALA LUMPUR: Education plays a big role in enabling Malaysian children to be better off than their parents economically, creating a highly mobile society.
That is the finding of a two-year study undertaken by Khazanah Research Institute titled “Climbing The Ladder: Social Economic Mobility in Malaysia” launched today.
The study sampled 4,999 respondents whom the researchers visited all over the country.
The report answers with a resounding "yes" the question whether Malaysian children are better off than their parents, Khazanah Research Institute managing director Datuk Charon Mokhzani said at the release of the report.
Charon said the results should help the government and regulatory bodies implement policies and guidelines that should enhance not only the opportunities but also equal rights for every Malaysian child, regardless of race and gender.
Social mobility removes social inequality and the study cites good education and hard work as very important for an individual to succeed in life, said Charon, who is also the executive director in the managing director's office at Khazanah Nasional Bhd.
KRI director of research Dr Muhammed Abdul Khalid, who authored the study, said that Malaysian children already had access to schooling which gave them education mobility.
As a result, he pointed out, 85 per cent of Malaysian children had a higher or the same skill level compared to their parents.
The study, Muhammed said, showed that education is key to children having a better income than their parents as those who were upwardly mobile have been proven to have higher income than their parents.
"If you are born poor in this country, with education, you will move up. There are ministers and politicians who have succeeded (in life) through education. Education provides an individual with upward mobility,” he added.
The intergenerational socio-economic mobility study compares the education, occupational skill, and income status of 4,999 parent-child pairs at a comparable working age.
"Malaysia is a very mobile society. In terms of income earnings, your income is due to you and the hard work you put in," Muhammed said.
"Four factors that impact the upward income mobility of B40 (children) are parents who have savings, getting a tertiary education, the removal of gender barriers and their location," explained Muhammed.
The director of research further explained that in terms of location, being in an urban domicile was advantageous towards being successful than being in a rural environment.
Conversely, he explained that, factors leading to downward income mobility included a lack of tertiary education, being a female child (hence the report's call to delve gender barriers), children not raised by both parents.
Muhammed said the policy implications of the study points towards the importance of wider access to education, the importance of pre-schooling to ensure children have a higher success rate in their earnings capacity later in life; and the importance of inclusive development plans and policies.
"These will ensure that there is social cohesion in the Malaysian society in the next generation through the reduction in income inequality," he added.