Narratives on Malaysia’s Contemporary Issues

1. Introduction: Background and Approaches

Contemporary discussions of the Malaysian economy cannot avoid mention of the “middle-income trap”. This term — coined by Indermit Gill and Homi Kharas in their book, An East Asian Renaissance: Ideas for Economic Growth (2007) — refers to a situation in which a country is trapped in the middle-income range, unable to become a high-income nation. Malaysia, it has been acknowledged, fits this description: its low labour cost model being challenged by countries with even lower labour costs like Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam. At the same time, held back by its inadequate human capital pool, Malaysia is unable to move up the technology ladder to compete with the likes of South Korea, Taiwan and now increasingly China. This poses a major challenge to Malaysia’s Wawasan (Vision) 2020 that envisions the country becoming an advanced nation by 2020. This challenge is recognized by Malaysia’s leadership under Prime Minister Najib, who, upon assuming office in 2009, gathered a group of experts to launch a “new Economic model for Malaysia” (NEAP 2009). A series of “transformation programmes” were planned to set in motion the transition towards becoming a high-income country.

The threat of the “trap”, together with these transformative initiatives, form the common setting across the three volumes; all of which, in their own ways, seek to assess the country’s past actions so as to consider its future. That this setting is very much on the minds of the editors and authors of the three volumes is revealed by references to it: Basu Das and Lee’s SocioEconomic Transformation raise this in their review; Hill, Tham and Ragayah’s Development Challenges incorporate it in their book’s subtitle, “Graduating from the Middle”; and only Weiss’ Handbook of Contemporary Malaysia makes no explicit mention of it.

However, although focusing on a single country — Malaysia — and involving inevitably many of the same authors, each volume has a different approach to issues. In edited volumes, this approach is typically reflected in the editors’ review chapter(s) in each volume. Reflecting its role as a handbook on contemporary Malaysia, Weiss’ approach was even-handed as the book sought to cover all topics considered relevant. An overview of the whole country was followed by discussions for each of four parts covering domestic politics, economics, social policy and development and international relations.

For volumes with a focused theme — as with Socio-Economic Transformation and Development Challenges — the review chapter should integrate the narratives of the book’s chapters, drawing out common themes and making links that individual chapters focused on specific topics often do not make. Socio-Economic Transformation and Development Challenges both have broadly similar agendas, namely, to assess the past with a view to suggest directions for the future, albeit through somewhat different narratives. Basu Das and Lee’s review chapter is a straightforward account of Malaysia’s “present, problems, and prospects”. With stocktaking as an objective, they provide a summary of the country’s economic development, then — through summarizing the themes of various chapters — build up a picture of its major ailments. The review chapter ends with a set of recommendations culled again from these chapters. While informative, this narrative does little more than summarize what the chapter authors opined. The editors’ conclusions in integrating the contents of the volume’s chapters were not made explicit. To be fair, however, that the chapters were originally papers from a workshop rather than specifically written for a book might have limited the editors’ ability to include material that would have a better thematic focus.

Hill, Tham and Ragayah faced no such constraint. While the most “dated” of the three volumes — the book was published in...