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Friday, April 23, 2004

Pollution in Jakarta

The Star (Malaysia) reports today about pollution levels in Jakarta, Indonesia. Apparently, there were only 7 days in the whole of last year, when the air was clean, compared to 22 days back in 2002. Level ratings were not provided in the article.

Jakarta is definetly a very polluted city, probably followed closely by Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, and cities in China.

Pollution will cause huge costs for health "maintenance" in those countries. The cities are choking with traffic, and industries located in the surrounding frequently blow their "exhaust" just out.

A recent article in the New Straits Times (April 6, 2004) provided a beautiful calculation for lost productivity caused by traffic jams. It wrote that if the average productive person in KL spends an extra 1 1/2 hours on the road every day, five days a week, 7 1/2 hours (or RM90) is lost. The RM90 are based on a annual per capita income of Malaysians of RM14,954 with that of KL residents standing at about RM28,000. On this basis, KL folk earn RM12 an hour.)

In a year, one stands to lose 360 hours (RM4,320). If there are 100,000 people losing productive time every day, 36 million man hours (or 98,630 years) are lost annually. In financial terms, this is a staggering RM432 million. All this excludes road maintenance, car wear etc, and of course health - our original topic.

(By Asia Business Consulting)