THE PENANG Northern Corridor Economic Region development programme is a Government initiative to accelerate economic growth and elevate income levels in the north of Peninsular Malaysia – encompassing the states of Perlis, Kedah, Pulau Pinang and the north of Perak. The NCER initiative will span from 2007 to the end of the 12th Malaysia Plan period, i.e. 2025.
There are a number of objectives behind the NCER initiative. Firstly, the programme is part of the Government’s commitment to helping the Region maximise its economic potential and closing the development and income gap between the different regions in Malaysia. Secondly, the Malaysian economy aims to move towards higher value-add and knowledge-based economic activities to drive further increases in per capita income. The NCER has the potential to make Malaysia a regional leader in a number of these sub-sectors.
The overall theme for the Northern Corridor initiative is “increasing value add from existing industries”, emphasising transformation and expansion of the agricultural, manufacturing, tourism and logistics sectors in the Region. The North, already the rice bowl of the country, has the potential to be at the forefront of the transformation of Malaysia’s agricultural sector, embracing commercial-scale farming and the latest technologies to become a modernised food zone, increasing exports of premium fresh and processed agricultural products and helping Malaysia to meet its food self-sufficiency objectives in staple foods such as rice. Already a home to one of the most important sectors of the economy – namely the electrical & electronics (E&E) sector – the NCER initiative will seek to accelerate the sector’s move towards higher value-add activities such as design and R&D. Key tourism assets such as Langkawi and Pulau Pinang will be enhanced to attract higher-yielding tourists, thereby increasing per capita tourist spending and the size of the tourism industry in the Region. Together with the strengthening of existing sectors namely agriculture, manufacturing and tourism, the NCER initiative will also seek to develop new industries in the Region, such as the cultivation of new commercial crops and the promotion of downstream activities in the agricultural sector, the promotion of new manufacturing activities such as biotechnology, sustainable materials and oil and gas, and the leveraging of the NCER’s well-established transport infrastructure and geographical proximity to Thailand and Sumatera to become the processing, logistics and trade centre for the Indonesia-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle (IMT-GT).
For more information, please contact:
Northern Corridor Economic Region
1st Floor, Kompleks Sime Darby,
Persiaran Kewajipan, USJ7
47600 Subang Jaya,
Malaysia.
Tel: +(603) 5885 8217
Fax: +(603) 5636 3552
Email: enquiry@ncer.com.my
Website: www.ncer.com.my