Malaysia: 30 years of poverty reduction, growth and racial harmony (original) (raw)
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Poverty in Malaysia: Need for a Paradigm Shift
Malaysia aspires to be a developed nation by 2020 and if these development ambitions are to be attained Malaysia needs to reexamine its past approaches to reducing poverty and inequalities in the country. Malaysia is no longer just grappling with absolute poverty but also with relative poverty, pockets of persistent poverty and urban poverty as well as increasing inequalities. While rural poverty still continues to be the focus of policymakers, urban poverty also needs urgent policy attention and prescriptions. Stubborn pockets of poverty continue to elude policy solutions and new forms of poverty are emerging in the context of a country that sees itself as a developed nation by 2020. Close attention has to be paid to income distribution as progress towards poverty reduction is marred unless improvements in income distribution occur alongside poverty reduction. A paradigm shift is needed in the way in which poverty is conceptualized, defined and measured in Malaysia as the reinterpretation of the Poverty and Income distribution data over the last three decades shows that poverty in Malaysia retains much of its original characteristics and income distribution patterns show inter ethnic inequalities remaining and a worsening position for certain ethnic groups. The call for a paradigm shift is further reinforced by the new development direction that is encapsulated in the New Economic Model with its focus on inclusive development and the bottom 40% of the population. Malaysia has made numerous proclamations of its aspirations to achieve developed country status by 2020. While these aspirations are laudable, there are several issues that have to be resolved before the nation joins the ranks of developed countries. Among the pressing issues that need to be addressed
Poverty Reduction Policies in Malaysia: Trends, Strategies and Challenges
Asian Culture and History, 2013
Malaysia is a multi-ethnic religious country with a population of 28.5 million, it is characterised by mainly three ethnic groups-Malay and indigenous people, Chinese, and Indians. Ever since independence in 1957, Malaysia has successfully transformed itself from a poor country into a middle-income nation. The Malaysian economy has seen a periodic growth despite challenging external factors. It can also definitely claim its success of combat against poverty. Despite its poverty reduction success, there still remains a vulnerable group of people in the country experiencing poverty for some geographical and societal reasons. This concept paper has several objectives: A brief description of the country's nature of poverty, poverty reduction policies and programs, and an analysis facing the challenges and recommendations for a sustainable poverty reduction in Malaysia.
2019
This paper provides a systematic assessment of the alleged exceptionality of Malaysia’s development progress and its likely explanations, in a comparative perspective. Using cross-country regressions and aggregate indices of education, health, poverty and gender equality outcomes, we offer three findings. First, we provide evidence supporting the hypothesis that Malaysia’s human development progress has been exceptional compared with that of countries with a similar level of economic development, primarily for the 1970s and 1980s, so showing that progress has early origins. Next, we show that such progress is explained by a combination of income-mediated and support-led mechanisms, including Malaysia’s early emphasis on education and health inputs and infrastructure development. Finally, we argue that an early advantage in state capacity, vis-a-vis other countries of similar income level, may be at the origin of Malaysia’s successful implementation of poverty-reduction and growth-en...
Malaysia's experience with poverty reduction: Lessons for Bangladesh
Malaysia is experiencing a prominent and promising economic rise and has set many instances of development of not only social enterprises but also a total development. This paper is penned with a view to approaching some facts and figures concerned to the Development Policy of Malaysia, and then to furnish some policy prescriptions for the development of Bangladesh. This is all through a conceptual paper where the review of relevant literatures has been made. It has been evidenced that, in 37 years, poverty incidence has dropped about 48.4%. Not only that, the incidence has come down at 1.
MALAYSIA TOWARDS ZERO POVERTY BY 2020
Since 1970, Malaysia have been adopted various policies to reduce poverty and address the socio-spatial inequality. These policies managed to reduce poverty rate from 52.4% in 1970 to 1.7 % in 2012. However, inequalities and disparity among regions and ethnic groups have not been properly addressed. Policies that worked well nationally might not be suitable to be used in addressing poverty at local level. Thus, this paper aims to critically look at the strengths and weaknesses of such policies particularly in eliminating poverty. The paper is based heavily on the review of the recent literature and the data gathered from Economic Planning Unit-EPU and the Department of Statistics, Malaysia. Empirical experiences have shown that Malaysia has managed to reduce poverty beyond the declaration of MDG; halving poverty by 2015. However several issues need to be addressed as the country aim to be a developed nation with zero poverty as indicated in its vision 2020. Although the slogan "growth with equity" was used, spatial disparities were found among region such as between Sabah and Penang. Penang State, which has experienced steady economic growth, has implemented top-up model of eliminating poverty where families earned less than poverty income line received top-up income from the state government since 2013, claimed to have zero poverty rate. However, the sustainability of this approach is questionable. In addition to that, the sign of incidence of poverty between rural and urban and among ethnic minorities is quite clear. This inequality with external factors (illegal migration and global economy) poses some challenges for achieving the vision 2020. By evaluating the policies and analyzing regional disparities the paper will enrich the literature on poverty and help the planners to formulate sound poverty eradication polices
Poverty Eradication: Government Policies and Challenges to Eradicate Urban Poverty in Malaysia
Malaysia is moving forward to become an industrialized and developed nation by the year 2020. In line with this transformation, it faces challenges related to phenomena of urban environment. The migration of people from rural areas and international immigrants give a strain on the economy as well as the society. The government continues to implement appropriate strategies and programs by providing a variety of needs such as food, clothing, water, education and accesses to services such as health facilities and public transport since the 1970s. Although the programs succeeded in reducing the poverty rate from 21.3 percent in 1970 to 1.0 percent in 2012, there are still many things to be considered in order to overcome the new urban poverty phenomenon. Abstrak Malaysia meletakkan harapan yang sangat tinggi untuk menjadi sebuah negara maju pada tahun 2020. Seiring dengan itu, Malaysia berhadapan dengan cabaran yang berkaitan dengan fenomena persekitaran bandar. Penghijrahan penduduk lu...
The Developing World and Development Issues: Interrogating the Development Trajectory of Malaysia
WILBERFORCE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
The development strides’ taken by the state and leadership of Malaysia over the last four decades are worth commending. Her high growth rate is consistent with high GDP, high GNI per Capita, low poverty indices, improvement in the quality of life, income distribution, promotion of growth and equity, racial harmony, religious tolerance and political stability. Malaysia, under the current leadership of Prime Minister Najid Razak, has colonial realities that correspond with those of other colonized countries of the developing world and also inherited the colonial legacies enumerated in the development literature. Being in the same predicaments with her sister countries in the global south, Malaysia was also faced with the option of following the development routes suggested by the Bretton Woods Institutions or those of dependency scholars. However, Malaysia attempted a now successful path unique to her realities with a mixture of the values of prior development theories where necessary...
Income Inequality, Poverty and Development Policy in Malaysia
This paper examines income inequality and poverty in Malaysia. It is argued that government intervention under the New Economic Policy has been successful in generating economic growth and development of the country in general, and in the development of the Malay ethnic group in particular. Government intervention that begins in the 1970s has significantly reduced poverty, particularly poverty amongst the Malay ethnic group. Furthermore, the overall income inequality as well as interethnic and rural-urban inequality has also decline since the middle of 1970 to 1990. Since 1990 however, even though poverty has decline further, income inequality has started to rise. Besides there emerge a new dimension of inequality, that is intraethnic inequality. This paper argues that the existence of intra-ethnic inequality, particularly intra-Malay inequality, pose the major challenge to Malaysian policymakers. The reason is that, government intervention under the New Economic Policy is articulated in the political rhetoric of ethnicity, and it appears to be coherent in addressing the problem of poverty amongst the Malays when majority of them were in poverty. The New Economic Policy has significantly reduced poverty amongst the Malay, and there now exist a new problem of intra-Malay inequality. The existence of intra-Malay inequality suggests that deeper division amongst the Malay community has emerged, implying that there emerged diverse and conflicting interests within the Malay community itself. Continued use of ethnicity as the foundation of economic policy is no longer coherent, and hence could only be undertaken with the risk of greater discontent, paradoxically amongst the Malay community. In such a situation, government intervention that is articulated in the political rhetoric of ethnicity would be incoherent to solve this new problem of inequality.
Poverty Alleviation Policies in Malaysia and Nigeria: A review
Environment-Behaviour Proceedings Journal
Poverty in Malaysia and Nigeria as well as most developing countries are alarmingly visible. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in recent years of Malaysia and Nigeria has not reflected in the poverty alleviation efforts from the governments of both countries. The need to review the past policies on poverty alleviation in these developing nations prompted this paper. Using secondary data sources, the poverty alleviation policy in Malaysia has made significant progress, while Nigeria is still struggling. Interestingly, after decades of poverty alleviation policies, Malaysia has been moving forward steadily although there are identifiable challenges to overcome while in Nigeria, the policies seems to have no progress due to lack of political will. Keywords: Poverty Alleviation; Policy; Developing Countries eISSN: 2398-4287© 2021. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (h...
Addressing Poverty through Innovative Policies: A Review of the Malaysian Experience
Good health, education, housing and access to the basic needs of life are basic human rights which often the poor are deprived of. Combating poverty is therefore a policy driven approach which requires innovative planning and execution. Since independence in 1957, Malaysia's policy goal focused on developing the infrastructure and improving the agricultural sector of the country. However, the watershed event of May 13, 1969 clearly vilified all previous efforts and recognized the need for a better approach to address issues of poverty, income equality and other basic physical and human rights for national development. Thus, the four long term policies from the New Economic Policy (1971-1990) to the New Economic Model (2011- 2020) and the five-year development plans has been put in placed in order to address poverty issues. Under the policies, there were broad and specific approaches and affirmative programs to alleviate poverty in the country, while working towards making Malaysia a high income nation by 2020, as envisioned in Vision 2020. Each successive policies and development plans saw great improvements in nation building efforts to improve the wellbeing of the population. This paper traces briefly the history of poverty alleviation attempts in Malaysia and discusses the policies and their impacts on the economy and social wellbeing. Each of the policies has their strengths and weaknesses and this paper seeks to share some of the innovative ideas and series of economic reforms to bring Malaysia to the level it is today. The last leg of the journey to achieve Vision 2020 necessitates uplifting of the bottom 40% to the ‘middle income group’. It further concludes on the call for a more rigorous intervention from the social work perspective.