Zeti Akhtar Aziz: Financial education initiatives in Malaysia Speech by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Launch of Financial LATeracy in conjunction with opening of Special Exhibition on Financial Literacy, Kuala Lumpur, 28 September 2015. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen Financial education has never been more important than in today’s environment. Participating effectively in the financial system can improve the economic well being of individuals and businesses. Financial education is therefore key so that members of our society will benefit from the financial system and from the new technologies that are transforming our financial landscape. It will help consumers to better understand the risks involved in managing their finances and will facilitate better financial decision making. Building a generation with financial competence therefore needs to start from an early age. This has been the motivation of Bank Negara Malaysia in the development of the Pocket Money Book or Buku Wang Saku for schools that was first launched in 1999. We are very honoured to have progressed this project in collaboration with Datuk Lat whose illustrations have made the complex subject of fundamental issues in finance appealing to school children. The universal appeal of Datuk Lat’s distinctive caricatures which are featured in the Pocket Money Book or Buku Wang Saku, have attracted students, teachers and parents to use it as a tool to nurture good savings habits and to encourage responsible money management among school children.
But most important, due to it being an area which sets us furthest apart from other developed countries, is the reform of the labour market institutions which are the cause of the our economy’s main problem. Our labour market framework makes us unique in comparison with other countries: it hampers job creation and encourages the use of job destruction as a mechanism for adjustment. Here it will not be enough, when the reform has been passed, to say “it’s a move in the right direction”. In this connection, not only the direction but also the scale of the reform is important. Yet we would surely not have to go very far. It would suffice for employers in Spain to be able, as in other developed countries, to offer jobs with productivity-based wages to the millions who are unemployed and for the latter to have the possibility of considering job offers that Spanish employers can’t even make to them due to the inflexibility of our singular regulations. Reducing unemployment and increasing employment is not only an indispensable social goal but it is a vital economic target at this juncture. If we manage to bring the labour market framework more into line with that of our European partners, there will be a swifter and stronger recovery in employment. And that would have effects that go beyond the obvious increase in the welfare of the workers, such as making it easier to restore health to public finances and reducing defaults, which would encourage lending.