LABOUR productivity shrank 16% to RM19,455 per person in the year’s second quarter with total hours worked dropping to 6.2 billion from an average 8.5 billion hours, said the Statistics Department today.

“The sluggish performance of labour productivity by value added per employment was following retention of employees (as) this group still had jobs but was on furlough,” said Chief Statistician Dr Mohd Uzir Mahidin in a statement.

“As highlighted earlier in the Labour Force Report for Q2 2020, there were 2.7 million employed persons who were temporarily not working.”

This group was not working due to the movement control order or were unable to work from home during the period, he said. 

In terms of productivity by value added per employment, the construction sector posted the highest drop at -40.8%. It was followed by manufacturing (-17.3%), mining and quarrying (-17.1%) and services (-15.6%).

Agriculture was the only sector that posted positive growth at 1.5%, rebounding from -8.9%.

In terms of labour productivity by value added per hour worked, three sectors posted double-digit growth; they were services (17.2%), agriculture (16.1%) and manufacturing (15.2%) sectors.

Mining and quarrying grew by 6.9% while construction was the only sector declining, at 3.2% after registering -1.6% growth in the previous quarter.

Other countries that implemented lockdowns to contain the outbreak, such as Singapore and the United Kingdom, also experienced similar effects on labour productivity, he said.

“In principle, the labour productivity influences growth of gross national income (GNI) per capita whereby a drop in labour productivity growth will shrink the GDP and GNI per capita.

“Thus, it was observed that the country’s GNI per capita was RM36,493 in Q2 2020 compared to the quarterly average of RM45,000 in the last five quarters,” said Uzir. – August 19, 2020.