The government needs to seriously implement measures to help and support micro and small enterprises throughout the country, as most of them are currently facing heavy financial burdens.

Among the problems faced by micro and small enterprises, are:

a. Bullying by big enterprises

Some of the larger enterprises deliberately increase the prices of products that they supply to micro and small companies in order to gain more profits.

The government, meanwhile, imposes control towards prices of products sold at the level of micro and small enterprises in order to ease the financial burden on the common people.

This collectively results in these micro and small enterprises suffering a loss of income, thus lowering the socioeconomic status of their respective owners as well as employees.

b. Low volume of customers

Due to highly unequal wealth distribution, really low wages, insufficient welfare programmes, as well as a rise in cost of living, many average citizens have much less money to spend.

This translates into far fewer customers frequenting micro and small enterprises to buy their products, thereby resulting in reduced income generated by these enterprises.

c. Saturation of the marketplace

There are many areas in which there are too many micro or small enterprises selling the same goods and that are located close to each other.

This dilutes the volume of customers frequenting these businesses in such locations, thus reducing the monthly income of each of these businesses.

One example is the presence of a high number of roadside stalls selling food along rural roads.

Many of them struggle to remain in business because there aren’t sufficient clients to support them all.

All of these problems have a bad impact, especially towards the workers from the B40 group in these companies, either through salary cuts or by being laid off by their respective employers.

Therefore, it is the government’s utmost responsibility to protect micro and small enterprises in the country, especially the socioeconomic statuses of its workers.

Among the important measures that the government needs to implement in order to help micro and small enterprises, include:

1. Imposing strict conditions and monitoring towards large enterprises

This is in order to control the rate of price increase of the supplied products to micro and small enterprises.

This move can curb the bullying towards micro and small enterprises by large enterprises that simply increase their supplied products’ prices in order to generate more profit for themselves.

This ultimately will enable micro and small enterprises to generate a high enough level of profit in order to support the lives of their respective workers.

2. Significantly raising peoples’ socioeconomic status

Our government, together with the rest of the Asean nations, needs to raise taxes against the elite class, foreign investors and multi-national corporations (MNCs) in their respective countries in order to increase those respective governments’ revenues.

Our government must also prioritise existing funds towards more impactful pro-people initiatives.

The funds gained from these measures can then be channelled towards stronger pro-people initiatives, such as an automatic old age pension scheme, establishing housing trusts in all states, and strengthening programs for uplifting the rural poor.

As a result, the average citizen’s socioeconomic status and spending power will increase, thus enabling them to more frequently purchase products from micro and small enterprises. This in turn will increase the revenue of these enterprises.

3. Preventing saturation of the marketplace

The government needs to carefully conduct a study and consult all relevant stakeholders in order to implement laws that limit the number of businesses and shops that offer the same service in any particular area.

This will enable businesses in every area to receive an adequate number of customers, thus increasing their monthly income.

(Raveen Jeyakumar is a writer who is passionate about social and environmental issues, and whose work can be found at reform-the-system.com.)