Transition In Malaysia Research Articles

Infectious Diseases Associated with Livestock Production: Mitigating Future Risks

Humans have traveled with their livestock to the ends of the earth, and animal husbandry has transformed the face of the planet. Even as livestock provide food, these same animals have also introduced humans to new diseases. A study in this month’s EHP argues that, although it is unclear whether the intensification of livestock production will lead to a higher risk of disease emergence and transmission, some important risk factors are certainly present.1 This is especially true in contexts where changes are occurring rapidly, sometimes before regulation can catch up. “Strong regulations can do a lot to mitigate zoonotic risk,” says first author Marco Liverani, a social scientist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. But first, he says, we need to better understand which agricultural and economic practices promote emerging infections, if we are to identify vulnerabilities and develop effective policies to address them. For millennia livestock have shared our abodes and our diseases. The Agricultural Revolution led to the development of larger settlements and denser livestock populations. Infectious diseases that only rarely might have struck small numbers of humans in the past could now spread between animals and large numbers of people. The age of epidemics had begun.2 A 2005 study by Mark Woolhouse and Sonya Gowtage-Sequeria, infectious disease specialists at the University of Edinburgh, found that 58% of the 1,407 diseases known to infect humans were zoonotic—that is, they had originated in animals. Pathogens that could infect both animals and humans made up an even bigger proportion of emerging infectious diseases: 73%.3 “We have very intense contact with livestock. There are plenty of opportunities for the pathogens to cross over,” Woolhouse says. “There is a lot of exchange of diseases between humans and livestock in both directions.” The continued growth of the human population, combined with growing demand for animal protein, has further intensified livestock production. The danger in this, according to Liverani and colleagues, is that some practices associated with intensified production have the potential to increase the risk of zoonoses.1 Take the emergence of Nipah virus, which first appeared in Malaysia in 1999. Epidemiologists revealed that Nipah was a virus that had never been seen in humans, and ultimately traced its origins to a family of large bats known as flying foxes.4 As Malaysia’s population increased dramatically in the late twentieth century,5 farmers began growing mangoes and raising pigs in recently deforested areas. Nipah is naturally found in the fruit-eating flying foxes, which feasted on the mangoes planted by farmers. The pigs ate the mangoes that had fallen to the ground, including those that were contaminated by Nipah-laden bat saliva. The pigs caught the virus from the bats, and the humans caught the virus from the pigs.6 Although zoonotic disease is a potential issue for large industrial farming operations,7 it’s also somewhat easier to regulate these operations, given their resources and commercial status, Liverani says. Backyard farmers like the ones in Malaysia might be exposed to fewer animals, but they tend to have longer, closer contact with the animals that they do have. Close contact between humans and livestock can facilitate the exchange of diseases in both directions. According to Liverani and colleagues, the greatest risk may occur when industrial livestock operations exist alongside small family farms and wildlife populations. Liverani says contacts between livestock and wild animals can result in new pathogens entering intensive production units, where the high concentration of animals can facilitate the amplification and transmission of disease. Although the dangers of zoonoses are real, Ro McFarlane, a veterinary epidemiologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, cautions that these diseases are only one aspect of the interconnected disease risks that exist between humans, livestock, and the environment. “The intensification of food industries has also given rise to diseases that affect food production,” she says, citing another example of this interconnection. “Many of these are not zoonotic, but the effect on human health through food security and livelihoods can also be catastrophic.” McFarlane says the strength of the work by Liverani et al. is that it incorporates socioeconomic and political as well as pathogen- and farm-level risk factors into the discussion about how to manage zoonotic risk from intensive livestock industries. “This is the news,” she says—“we are making progress in doing ‘new science.’”

The gender politics of economic competitiveness in Malaysia's transition to a knowledge economy

Many academic commentators have pointed to how the widening and deepening of a neoliberal reform agenda in Southeast Asia has brought about the end of developmental forms of state governance and the emergence of less directly market interventionist states pursuing economic ‘competitiveness’. In this paper, I note how notions of competitiveness are increasingly fused with ideas regarding the contribution of gender equity and women's empowerment to national economic success. However, drawing upon a case study of Malaysia, this paper highlights how government policies stressing both the marketisation of social reproduction and the need to expand women's productive roles are constantly brought into tension with embedded social structures. Such an emphasis is essential to any understanding of the role of the Malaysian state in economic development – a role that has been fundamentally shaped by a localised politics of ethnicity. The paper draws upon examples from government policy-making that conceptualise women as key workers in the emerging knowledge-driven economy and as microentrepreneurs driving pro-poor economic growth and illustrates how such policies are brought into tension with traditionalist discourses concerning the appropriate role of women in society.

Accumulated knowledge and technological progress in terms of learning rates: A comparative analysis on the manufacturing industry and the service industry in Malaysia

Summary Known as the largest exporter of rubber and tin for decades, Malaysia began its industrialization by shifting from agriculture towards the manufacturing industry. This study shows the recent signs of Malaysia's transition from an industrial to a post‐industrial age. This is similar to Japan's transition from an industrial society in the 1980s, with manufacturing technology at its center, to a knowledge‐based society, with information technology as its core, in the 1990s. Studying the Malaysian industries’ technological progress suggests that Malaysia is about to undergo a transition from a dominating industrial age towards an economy with a strong service industry. Continuous technological learning and management should be emphasized to help Malaysian industries in adjusting to a new era of global challenges while remaining highly competitive. Measuring and monitoring technological learning is essential for technological capacity building and for policy management. This study measured the learning rates in the manufacturing and service industries of Malaysia. A dynamic cubic learning curve model was incorporated into a neoclassical production function and was used to measure learning coefficients in the Malaysian manufacturing and service industries. The findings demonstrated that the learning trend in each sub‐sector in both the manufacturing and service industries behaved in three distinct manners: convex with a minimum, concave with a maximum, and concave with no maximum. The identification of the performing, forgetting, and non‐performing years of each individual industry attests to the dynamism in the technological learning of Malaysia's manufacturing and service industries.

The effects of exchange rate variability on Malaysia's disaggregated electrical exports

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the influence of exchange rate variability on the demand for Malaysia's top five electrical exports as classified by Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) product groups.Design/methodology/approachThe autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) modelling approach to co‐integration is employed in order to estimate the influence of exchange rate variability on export demand.FindingsThe empirical results indicate that foreign income and prices are important determinants of export demand for all of the five electrical exports, in both the long run and the short run, over the sample period 1990‐2001. More interestingly, this paper supports the view that exchange rate variability has an adverse effect on Malaysia's electrical exports.Research limitations/implicationsOne limitation of the study is the appropriateness of the ARDL modelling approach to examine the influence of exchange rate variability (which is stationary, I(0)) on trade behaviour such as export demand behaviour.Practical implicationsThis paper is important to policymakers for the design of both exchange rate and trade policies in order to promote export growth, which could lead to Malaysia's transition towards high‐technology industrialisation.Originality/valueThis paper examines the influence of exchange rate variability on the demand for Malaysia's top five electrical exports as classified by SITC product groups, information which is not available in the existing literature.

The nutrition and health transition in Malaysia

The accelerated phase of industrialisation and urbanisation in recent decades has inevitably brought about changes in the lifestyle of Malaysians. Changes in dietary habits and sedentary lifestyles are known to be associated with changes in health and increased prevalence of chronic diseases in the population. The objective of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the link between demographic variables and food consumption patterns related to the nutrition transition in Malaysia. This review uses various reports and publications from several ministries and selected local studies. The statistics compiled over the last two decades have shown that as the population achieves affluence, intakes of calories, fats and sugars increase, which may account for the substantial increase in food importation bills over the same period. Similarly, the rapid growth of the fast food industry during the last decade has added another dimension to the change in food consumption patterns of Malaysians. With the exception of a study on adolescents, the prevalences of overweight and obesity in children and adults are not strictly comparable due to the difference in body mass index (BMI) cut-off points in children and the study protocol in adults, and hence should not be misinterpreted as trends. The recent recommendation to lower the BMI cut-off points for Asians would only increase the magnitude of the existing prevalence among adults. The need to promote healthy nutrition for the population must be pursued vigorously, as the escalation of nutrition-related chronic degenerative diseases - once an urban phenomenon--has now spread to the rural population at an alarming rate. This paper indicates that the problem is real and needs urgent attention because it may be just the tip of the iceberg.

The migration transition in Malaysia.

"Exploring the unique experience of migration transition in Malaysia, this paper identifies the turning points in relation to the level and nature of economic and labor market developments in Malaysia. Examining the development dynamics that mark the passage from exporting labor to depending on foreign labor, the paper concludes that such dynamics are influenced not only by economic but also sociocultural, demographic and policy factors. Several lessons from the Malaysian experience are drawn at the end to be utilized by other countries that still have to reach the turning points of the migration transition."

Reviews: Towards Global Localization. The Computing and Telecommunications Industries in Britain and France, Housing Policies in the Socialist Third World, round Table 85. Transport and Spatial Distribution of Activities, round Table 86. Evaluating Investment in Transport Infrastructure, Regional Shopping Centres, Sustaining Earth: Response to the Environmental Threats, Conservation of Biodiversity for Sustainable Development, London Papers in Regional Science 21. Spatial

Reviews: Towards Global Localization. The Computing and Telecommunications Industries in Britain and France, Housing Policies in the Socialist Third World, round Table 85. Transport and Spatial Distribution of Activities, round Table 86. Evaluating Investment in Transport Infrastructure, Regional Shopping Centres, Sustaining Earth: Response to the Environmental Threats, Conservation of Biodiversity for Sustainable Development, London Papers in Regional Science 21. Spatial

Aiken, S. Robert and Colin H. Leigh, "Vanishing Rain Forests: The Ecological Transition in Malaysia" (Book Review)

Aiken, S. Robert and Colin H. Leigh, "Vanishing Rain Forests: The Ecological Transition in Malaysia" (Book Review)

Agriculture in the Malaysian Region

Malaysia's transition from a country dependent on agriculture and mining to an industrialized society is readily apparent, but the process of change remains poorly understood. When R.D. Hill began studying agriculture in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei in the 1960s, he found swiddening, market-gardening, semi-commercial wet-rice cultivation and large scale plantations. Today, Malaysian agriculture has become highly capital-intensive and increasingly specialized, and many forms of production have all but disappeared. Once dependent on the export of primary products such as tin, rubber and palm oil, Malaysia is now an industrialized, middle income country. Singapore has nearly abandoned its primary sector. This completely revised edition of Hill's 1982 study, with two lengthy new chapters, explains the evolution of agriculture in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore over the last forty years, with particular attention to the agro-ecosystems of the major crops.