This is a study of Malaysia’s new political economy, with a focus on ownership and control of the corporate sector. It offers a pioneering assessment of government-linked investment companies (GLICs), a type of state-owned institution that has long prevailed in the corporate sector but has not been analysed. Malaysia’s history of government-business ties is unique, while the nature of the nexuses between the state and the corporate sector has undergone major transitions. Corporate power has shifted from the hands of foreign firms to the state to the ruling party, and well-connected businessmen, and back to the state. Corporate wealth is now heavily situated in the leading publicly-listed government-linked companies (GLCs), controlled through block shareholdings by a mere seven GLICs under the jurisdiction of the Minister of Finance. To indicate why these GLICs are important actors in Corporate Malaysia, this study provides a deep assessment of their ownership and control of Bursa Malaysia’s top 100 publicly-listed enterprises.
As Malaysia's government responded to the 1997-98 financial crisis, the global financial community criticised its measures as bail outs for politically-influential corporate interests. This book examines the Asian crisis and government policy responses, with emphasis on capital controls as well as corporate, bank and debt restructuring exercises.
Current inquiries into the political economy of financial policymaking in Malaysia tend to focus on the high-level drama of crisis politics or simply point to the limited impact of post-crisis financial reforms, given that politico-business relations have remained close. In so doing, pundits ignore a number of intriguing questions: what is the relationship between financial development and financialisation and how has it played out in the Malaysian context? And more generally: how can a country like Malaysia become significantly more financially developed, yet fail to emancipate the financial system from political control; a core element of the financial development discourse? To unravel the complexities of this puzzle, this book subjects the history and contemporary practices of financial policymaking in Malaysia to scrutiny. It argues that to understand financial development in Malaysia, its progress and reversals, it is important to conceptualise it as a political, rather than a merely technical process. In so doing, the book echoes a more profound concern in the political economy literature, namely the evolving relationship between states and markets, and the supposed retreat or reassertion of the state at a time of increasing (financial) globalisation. The book can generate further insights into the evolving role of the state with regard to broader processes of development and marketisation, as they relate specifically to finance.
Reconceptualises the general meeting, controlling shareholders and institutional investors as fiduciaries in four leading common law Asian jurisdictions.
Braced for Impact: Reforming Kazakhstan’s National Financial Holding for Development Effectiveness and Market Creation offers a framework for assessing the readiness of development finance institutions (DFIs) and their conglomerates to deliver credible development impact and create financial markets. The framework focuses on accountability for impact, responsible leveraging of entrusted capital, holistic risk management, and proper governance. It is used to assess Baiterek, Kazakhstan’s national financial holding—a conglomerate of DFIs—and to derive policy options and practical recommendations for the given country context. If the recommended reforms are implemented, Baiterek will be braced for positive impact on Kazakhstani firms, households, and the environment while also helping create deeper financial markets through robust mobilization of private capital. A reformed Baiterek could become a leading global DFI conglomerate and a role model for similar institutions in other countries. However, if too few or none of the recommended reforms are undertaken, Baiterek will need to brace for further criticism from unhappy stakeholders.
In order to attain its objective of becoming a high-income economy by 2020, Malaysia is engaged in efforts to enhance the performance of its innovation system. A range of challenges need to be addressed and different policy tools can help in this respect. For this purpose the national ...
OECD Investment Policy Reviews: Malaysia presents an assessment of the investment climate in Malaysia, including the institutional and legislative framework for investment.
In this first critical, multidisciplinary assessment of recent privatization in a developing country, the contributors offer valuable lessons for the comparative study of denationalization and related public policy options. After an introductory survey, the volume presents broad perspectives on the context, formulation, and adjustment of privatization policy in Malaysia. The contributors review the distributional implications of specific privatizations for the public interest as well as for consumer and employee welfare. The book concludes with an examination of the economic, political, and cultural impacts of the privatization of physical infrastructure, telecommunications, and television programming.
Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century's fastest growing economies as well as some of the world's most durable authoritarian regimes. Many accounts of rapid growth alongside monopolies on political power have focused on crony relationships between the state and business. But these relationships have not always been smooth, as anti-corruption campaigns, financial and banking crises, and dramatic bouts of liberalization and crackdown demonstrate. Why do partnerships between political and business elites fall apart over time? And why do some partnerships produce stable growth and others produce crisis or stagnation? In Precarious Ties, Meg Rithmire offers a novel account of the relationships between business and political elites in three authoritarian regimes in developing Asia: Indonesia under Suharto's New Order, Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional, and China under the Chinese Communist Party. All three regimes enjoyed periods of high growth and supposed alliances between autocrats and capitalists. Over time, however, the relationships between capitalists and political elites changed, and economic outcomes diverged. While state-business ties in Indonesia and China created dangerous dynamics like capital flight, fraud, and financial crisis, Malaysia's state-business ties contributed to economic stagnation. To understand these developments, Rithmire presents two conceptual models of state-business relations that explain their genesis and why variation occurs over time. She shows that mutual alignment occurs when an authoritarian regime organizes its institutions, or even its informal practices, to induce capitalists to invest in growth and development. Mutual endangerment, on the other hand, obtains when economic and political elites are entangled in corrupt dealings and invested in perpetuating each other's dominance. The loss of power on one side would bring about the demise of the other. Rithmire contends that the main factors explaining why one pattern dominates over the other are trust between business and political elites, determined during regime formation, and the dynamics of financial liberalization. Empirically rich and sweeping in scope, Precarious Ties offers lessons for all nations in which the state and the private sector are deeply entwined.
This edited volume of essays examines a wide range of issues related to the regionalisation of competition policy in South East Asia, where the ten member states of ASEAN have launched the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). Written by a diverse group of academics, practitioners and policy-makers, this book explore issues such as the role of competition policy in facilitating the market-integration ambitions of the ASEAN member states, the challenges arising from divergences in the national competition law regimes of the ASEAN member states, and the absence of a supranational legal framework and the future of competition policy in light of the AEC Blueprint 2025. Given the nexus between regional competition policy and regional market integration, this book will be of particular interest to lawyers, economists and policymakers working in the fields of competition law and regional trade law.
