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Malaysia's higher education sector has a substantial number and diverse types of public and private providers, which have contributed toward improving access. Over time, with improved access, there are increasing policy efforts directed toward improving the quality of higher education to meet the desired human capital needed for advancing economic development. This paper assesses three key areas that have been undertaken to improve the quality of higher education, their measurements, achievements, outstanding challenges, and ensuing implications on future policy directions. The key performance indicators used for monitoring quality improvements show that some targets have been achieved. A review of the approach used to measure performance and a consolidation of the sector are needed for further quality improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fostering innovation and upskilling labour pools have become key goals in national economic development plans and education and training system reforms since the mid‐1990s. For their transformation into knowledge‐based economies, countries in Southeast Asia have relied on importing transnational higher education providers and have envisioned themselves as international education hubs. As existing research from transnational education and higher education governance studies as well as economic geography and regional studies has not sufficiently addressed this nexus of transnational education and regional economic development, this paper investigates the role of foreign higher education institutions in economic development strategies in Malaysia and Singapore. It explores why and how states have strategically coupled their higher education systems with transnational education. The comparative case analysis draws on empirical evidence from 42 semi‐structured interviews. It finds that despite the two states' ostensibly similar ambitions to attract foreign higher education institutions, policies and outcomes differ strongly. Whereas in Malaysia a structural coupling led foreign subsidiaries to provide foreign degrees to domestic students and generate revenue in the private higher education sector, in Singapore foreign subsidiaries have been deployed strategically to upgrade the talent pool and public higher education system of the city‐state via functional coupling. Conceptualizing transnational education policies as forms of strategic coupling contributes to understanding their embeddedness within states' broader, historically formed economic development strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the influences of Malaysia's Federation Land Development Authority (FELDA) scheme in fostering inclusive rural development. Based on the model of holistic inclusive development, the paper investigates the performance of FELDA from four perspectives: social development, industrialisation, modernisation and basic needs. The main findings of the study indicate that, to a large extent, the scheme has successfully stimulated both the social and economic development of the community. Nonetheless, establishing a strong trust, social cohesion and rapport between the public authorities and community remain the main challenges in determining the success of this state-led agenda. Moreover, keeping traditional values in the modern system will be the key principle for the sustainability of the programme if plans are made to adopt the scheme in other regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In spite of the fact that the connection between exports of goods and services and economic growth has for quite some time been talked about, the examination of the relationship in light of recent global events such as economic policy uncertainty and geopolitical risks is yet to be given the required attention. Various empirical researches have demonstrated that the export‐led growth hypothesis (ELGH) holds for singular nations in terms of overall economic development. However, this study re‐examines the ELGH with a special focus on the absolute and mediating impact of economic policy uncertainties and geopolitical risks. With data spanning the period 1980 to 2018. Empirical results from the Autoregressive distributed lag model and the error correction models suggest that for Malaysia, Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) exerts a negative impact on growth evens as its moderating impact on exports leads to negative economic growth. On the other hand, the impact of Geopolitical risk on growth is both negative and positive but insignificant in the short‐run and long‐run respectively. The study suggests the government of Malaysia works to ensure macroeconomic and political stability to achieve export‐driven growth in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth effects of financial development might be asymmetric and nonlinear according to the level of financialization of countries. As a corollary to this notion, in the subject study, we developed a three‐regime threshold autoregressive distributed lags (TARDL) model, which allows us to accommodate the asymmetric effect of financial development on economic growth in top 10 financially developed countries. We augmented the TARDL model by including trade openness, capital formation and labour as potential determinants of economic growth. The empirical findings revealed the existence of threshold asymmetric co‐integration between variables. In particular, in the upper regime, financial development boosts economic growth in Singapore while it exerts a negative impact on economic growth in Finland. In the middle regime, financial development increases economic growth in Australia and Singapore. However, in the lower regime, financial development hampers economic growth in the US, Malaysia and Singapore. Trade openness has a positive long‐run influence on economic growth in Canada, South Africa, Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Finland and Norway. Capital formation strengthens economic growth in the US and Malaysia in the long‐run. Labour is found to sustain economic growth in the long‐run for Malaysia and Singapore. The dynamic multipliers which depict the response path of economic growth to a one‐unit shock of financial development in the three regimes highlight the discrepancies in the reaction of economic growth to financial development shocks occurring in different regimes. Important policy implications can be instigated from the empirical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the impact of economic development on energy consumption and climate change using Malaysian data from 1977 to 2018. We employ five alternative indices—gross domestic product, financial development, industry value‐added, agricultural value‐added, and manufacturing value‐added—to assess economic development. Three alternative proxies (electricity, oil, and fossil fuel consumption) are employed to determine the energy consumption level. The climate change variable has been approximated through the level of CO2 emission and the average temperature for the country. Data has been analysed through three‐stage least square, vector autoregression, and innovative accounting approach. Results indicate that a higher level of economic development leads to higher energy consumption, which contributes to climate change. Moreover, the increase in urbanization and transportation also increases the level of carbon emissions. Forestation, on the other hand, plays a vital role in the improvement of environmental quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates the impact of insurance activities on economic growth in Malaysia over the period 1990–2015. Combined cointegration in the presence of identified structural breaks was used to confirm the existence of long‐run relationships among economic growth, insurance activities, human capital, physical capital, and industrial production. The findings indicate feedback effects between insurance activities and economic growth in the long run. The study provides new insights for policymaking to enhance economic growth via insurance activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of financial development (FD) on economic growth in the context of Malaysia and Indonesia has been examined in this study regarding the role of the financial crisis and strategic changes in the institutional setup. Autoregressive distributed lags and threshold regression were applied, and time series data were analyzed for the period between 1984 and 2017 revealing that FD promoted the economic growth in both economies during this period. A nonlinear analysis also revealed that FD and economic growth follow an inverted U‐shape relation in the case of Malaysia whereas, in Indonesia, it followed a U‐shape relation. It was discovered that not all measures of FD promote economic growth. For instance, market capitalization was profound in the Malaysian economy while credit to the private sector and money supply was conducive for the Indonesian economy. The analysis demonstrated that the Asian and global financial crisis adversely affected economic growth in the case of Indonesia due to poor institutional quality (IQ), whereas in Malaysia it was relatively safe from the adversity brought about by the financial crisis due to the presence of IQ and good corporate governance. However, a positive change in IQ was found to have a much greater impact on augmenting economic growth rather than playing a mediating role in connection with FD and economic growth in Malaysia. In the context of Indonesia however, IQ was found to impede economic growth but played a positive and significant mediating role in the nexus of FD and economic growth. The spill‐over analysis revealed that Malaysian FD is positively associated with Indonesian economic growth while Indonesian FD is negatively associated with the Malaysian economy. This study provided all economic and anecdotal explanations in supporting the results of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the emergence of a technology-based start-up ecosystem in Malaysia that is modeled on the tech economy of Silicon Valley and borrows a number of notions about value, capital, and merit. Malaysia is encouraging distinct forms of entrepreneurship as a tool for national economic development and for the socioeconomic mobility of Malay Muslims, who are the recipients of affirmative action-style benefits from the state. I propose that Malaysia's entrepreneurial ambitions have engendered a dilemma within the start-up ecosystem: Malays must utilize their special benefits while being viewed as lacking in entrepreneurial spirit for doing so. This dilemma is the result of the specific forms of cultural and financial capital that are needed to navigate a challenging economic landscape that is far from a meritocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo is one of the global hotspots of deforestation and forest degradation. The planting of oil palm has played a key role in the transformation of land use in the state. While much of the expansion in Sarawak so far has taken place in state forests (80%), many new plantations are being established on native customary rights (NCR) land. A significant portion of the total land area in Sarawak (20-25%) is claimed as native customary land where villagers traditionally practise extensive, semi-subsistence farming. This article explores how major resource development projects intersect with and accentuate internal community differences in sites of new plantations. We do so by examining the case of an Iban village where the introduction of a large-scale oil palm scheme has resulted in conflict and division within the community. By analysing the narratives that suggest that large-scale land development projects 'bring development to the people', utilising 'idle lands' and 'creating employment' to lift them out of poverty, we argue that political and economic processes related to cultivation of oil palm intersect with local community differences in two ways. First, these projects cement and enhance internal power structures and inequalities. Second, the government's development narratives influence communities and link local community relations with national political discourses in complex ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, debates about climate change reporting in national media focus largely on Western democracies. We aim to broaden the scope for cross-national comparison by looking at climate change reporting in Malaysia - an emerging economy in the global South facing developmental tensions common to many, specifically an ambitious national climate change agenda in the face of an economy largely reliant on the extraction and export of primary commodities. Our questions are: How is climate change framed in Malaysian media? How do Malaysian narratives compare with those found elsewhere? How do climate change and development narratives interact in a 'second tier' emerging economy? And lastly, what do these interacting narratives say about the salience of neoliberal and North-South perspectives on climate change and development? To answer these questions, we undertook a content analysis of climate action stories published over a three-year period (2009-2011) in five English-language news sources. In addition to a high proportion of environmental-framed articles across all the news sources, our findings show that climate change has been framed as both a multi-scalar responsibility and a positive opportunity for two key stakeholders in development, i.e. neoliberal market forces and geopolitical actors keenly interested in restructuring the international political economy along lines reminiscent of the new international economic order ( NIEO) demands of the 1970s. We label the key themes emergent from our analysis as climate capitalism and green nationalism (neither of which are unique to Malaysia), while demonstrating that debates about palm oil are particularly illustrative of the interaction of these themes in the Malaysian context. In the final section we suggest thinking of the interacting elements as a singular, structuralist model of green development - one reminiscent of discourses at work in other emerging economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Malaysia, a country that ranks among the world's most recognised medical tourism destinations, medical tourism is identified as a potential economic growth engine for both medical and non-medical sectors. A state-level analysis of economic impacts is important, given differences between states in economic profiles and numbers, origins, and expenditure of medical tourists. We applied input-output (I-O) analysis, based on state-specific I-O data and disaggregated foreign patient data. The analysis includes nine of Malaysia's states. In 2007, these states were visited by 341,288 foreign patients, who generated MYR1,313.4 m ($372.3 m) output, MYR468.6 m ($132.8 m) in value added, and over 19,000 jobs. Impacts related to non-medical expenditure are more substantial than impacts related to medical expenditure, and indirect impacts are a substantial part of total impacts. We discuss management and policy responses and formulate recommendations for data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research, conducted to analyze the level of food security among poor and low-income households in the east coast economic region of Malaysia, uses primary data of 460 families from the E-Kasih poor households database, based on a cluster random sampling technique. Food security levels were measured using the United States Agency for International Development Household Food Insecurity Access model. Findings indicate that 52.8% of households are food secure, 23.3% mildly food insecure, 14.3% moderately food insecure, and 9.6% are severely food insecure. These findings are very important to assist policymakers to achieve Vision 2020 and the targets of Malaysian National Plans regarding food security, socioeconomic development, and the alleviation of poverty. The involvement of private sector and community-based organizations are important to combat short run, seasonal, and event-related risks, as well as for the development of appropriate mitigation and adaptation options to ensure sustainable food security at household level in Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The OECD's Paris Declaration (2005) discouraged donor project implementation units (PIUs) which are not integrated into government. But little is known about the behaviour and effects of PIUs integrated into government. Are they efficient? Do they support country systems? This article responds to these questions using research comparing two streams of implementation of schools investments in Malaysia's Eighth Plan 2001-2005, one via government alone and the other via a World Bank PIU integrated into government. It emphasises the conflicts which can exist within country systems, and how these affect the choices which a donor faces in seeking efficient implementation of a project while supporting country systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]