Book Description

This work analyses the Malaysian economic development model and its performance over the past three decades. Malaysia's successes as well as challenges in development planning are analyzed in the context of this work in order to provide insight into the application of various development planning models to the Malaysian society and the outcome of those plans. It is evident from this study that the government's successful implementation of a free market economy along with a balanced approach to growth within the framework of strong cultural, political, and social institutions has been the key to a sustained growth in Malaysia. The uniqueness of the Malaysian approach lies in the government's flexibility in deploying different growth models and theories at the different stages of its development history. The combination of the policies it followed was based on the policy makers' recognition of the unique history and culture of Malaysia and its economic strengths and weaknesses. By tailoring its planning to these factors Malaysia was able to better utilize its competitive advantage. Even though Malaysia's planning efforts have been successful in the past and most of the major economic indicators reveal a stable Malaysian economy, Malaysia still faces a number of challenges to sustain economic growth. Those challenges are political stability, cultural inequalities, and imbalance in foreign trade. To overcome those challenges, Malaysia must employ aggressive plans for its human capital development along with it investments in building the proper infrastructure for information technology.