Malaysia. The New Economic Policy in Malaysia: Affirmative action, ethnic inequalities and social justice Edited by Edmund Terence Gomez and Johan Saravanamuttu Singapore: NUS Press. 2013. Pp. xviii + 393. Map, Notes, Index.

Abstract

The New Economic Policy in Malaysia: Affirmative action, ethnic inequalities and social justice Edited by EDMUND TERENCE GOMEZ and JOHAN SARAVANAMUTTU Singapore: NUS Press. 2013. Pp. xviii + 393. Map, Notes, Index, doi:10.1017/S0022463414000745 In combining the findings of two research groups at Universiti Malaya and the National University of Singapore, this edited collection represents the most comprehensive assessment to date of the efficacy of Malaysia's New Economic Policy. The grand aim of the NEP after 1971 was to correct ethnic economic imbalances in Malaysia, particularly through propelling Malays and other 'indigenes' into the modern industrial and commercial sphere. This affirmative action programme involved unprecedented state intervention in Malaysian economic life, and it has gained admiring emulation in Fiji, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and India. As the editors point out in their introduction, there is no disputing the reduction in poverty levels and restructuring in corporate equity holdings that the NEP induced. But, there have been downsides, which all the contributors point to. As Ragayan Haji Mat Zin tells us, poverty eradication has not been spatially uniform--Kedah, Kelantan, Perlis, Terengganu, Sabah, and Sarawak continue to experience higher incidences of poverty than the rest of Malaysia, given less access to education, lower levels of foreign investment, and limited industrialisation. Meanwhile, the 'disloyalty' of electorates towards the ruling coalition, in the east-coast peninsular states and the East Malaysian territories, has been punished by the withholding of federal largesse. There also remains an ethnic concentration of poverty amongst Malay/bumiputera and Indian communities. In the countryside, the divide between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' has been accentuated by development initiatives. This is brought home in Maznah Mohamad's excellent micro-study of villages in northwest Kelantan--over the longer term, the NEP did not succeed here in making the Malay poor any less deprived, highlighted by the phenomena of reverse urban-rural migration after the 1997 crash, the dislocations of youth unemployment and drug abuse, the disadvantages for women and the large number of single-parent families, and the tendency for the Malay village to remain an 'exclusive [ethnic] enclave' (p. 81). The failures of the NEP in small and medium-scale enterprises are brought out by Gomez's own chapter, where he argues that affirmative action in business and an over-concentration on 'race' rather than 'merit' has contributed to Malaysia's economic exposure to the vicissitudes of the global economy and has suppressed genuine entrepreneurship. A similar story emerges in Andrew Aeria's study of Sarawak: the NEP has been used to increase wealth accumulation by a few well-connected elite bumiputera politicians and businessmen, backed by a clique of astonishingly rich ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs. In this rampant rent-seeking and cronyism, the costs of infrastructure projects have been artificially inflated, leaving even less funding for projects directed at sustainable poverty alleviation. Turning to the public sector, Chan Chee Khoon admits that Malaysia's public healthcare system is remarkably comprehensive for a developing-world country. But the recent tendency for the government and parastatals to buy into private providers is leading to a two-tier system, potentially leaving a 'decrepit public sector for the marginalised lower classes' (p. 167). As Lim Hong Hai emphasises, increased Malay domination of the civil service has run completely contrary to the prime 'race-blind' objective of the NEP to eliminate the association of ethnicity with economic function. …