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This paper analyses the policies related to the development of the agricultural and industrial sectors in Malaysia. The objective of the paper is to determine whether there exist biases in government policies pertaining to these two sectors. The paper begins by providing a brief overview of Malaysian economic development. This section analyses the policies introduced to develop the two sectors. The next section contains an analysis of the policies, government expenditure and employment in the agricultural and industrial sectors to test the presence of policy biases. The paper concludes that there is no significant policy biases between these two sectors.

The term success in this paper is measured by the yardstick of both material and non‐material ones. This study attempts to examine the success story behind Malaysia's development with evidences drawn from both the conventionally used criteria together with the Islamically motivated universal values and ethos. Of the conventional factors, political consolidation of the first Prime Minister in the presence of dynamic enterprising ability of the Chinese as well as South Indian Community based on family values played a pivotal role in creating a foundation for development. The majority Malays, on the other hand, being the victim of colonial legacies and multi‐farious historical phenomenon were by‐passed. Subsequently, the big bargain of 1957, the year of independence by way of securing Malay special rights in the constitution laid the foundation for new strategy of development based on distributive justice. The New Economic Policy with the twin objetives of eradicating poverty and restructuring society could not have been implemented in the absence of universal values such as loyalty, tolerance, sympathy, caring and sharing being demonstrated by all the races regardless of socio‐economic and political superiority. This paper thus argues that from the very beginning the committed and pragmatic leadership, policy continuation, policy dynamism and policy flexibility, among many others, acted as a catalyst for the success story behind Malaysia's development.

With the increasing importance of the service-providing sectors, information from these sectors has become essential to the understanding of contemporary business cycles. Contribution of services to GDP during postwar recessions is clearly recorded in Table 4.1. On average, decline in real GDP during recessions would have been at least 70% more severe without the stabilization effect from services. Moore (1987) noted that the ability of the service sectors to create jobs has differentiated business cycles since the 1980s, and has led economy-wide recessions to be shorter and less severe. This is reflected as mild declines in employment of service sectors and its dominance in the total nonfarm employment, as plotted in Figure 4.1a. The growth in real GDP by major type of products obtained from National NIPA is depicted in Figure 4.1b. Since 1985, services never had a negative growth, which has muted the volatility in goods and structures, and resulted in more stable economy measured by total GDP (see also McConnell and Perez-Quiros, 2000).

In recessions, depository institutions accounted for most declines in mortgage flows. Recently, they partially offset their withdrawals from primary markets with accumulations of mortgage-backed securities. Increases in direct flows into agency and private pools also countered the declining flows elsewhere. As the less-procyclical secondary mortgage markets grew and matured, they increasingly stabilized mortgage flows. During periods of international financial crises or of domestic economic stress, GSEs may have been particularly effective in stabilizing mortgage markets and moderating business cycles.

The recession the US economy entered in December of 2007 is considered to be the most severe downturn the country has experienced since the Great Depression. The unemployment rate reached as high as 10.1% in October 2009 – the highest we have seen since the 1982 recession. In this chapter, we examine the severity of this recession compared to those in the past by examining worker flows into and out of unemployment taking into account changes in the demographic structure of the population. We identify the most vulnerable groups of this recession by dissagregating the workforce by age, gender, and race. We find that adjusting for the aging of the US labor force increases the severity of this recession. Our results indicate that the increase in the unemployment rate is driven to a larger extent by the lack of hiring (low outflows), but flows into unemployment are still important for understanding unemployment rate dynamics (they are not as acyclical as some literature suggests) and differences in unemployment rates across demographic groups. We find that this is indeed a “mancession,” as men face higher job separation probabilities, lower job finding probabilities, and, as a result, higher unemployment rates than women. Lastly, there is some evidence that blacks suffered more than whites (again, this difference is particularly pronounced for men).

Data from the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation are linked to longitudinal records from the Social Security Administration to examine the relationship between the long-term unemployment that prime-aged (ages 25–55) male workers experienced around the time of the 1980–1982 twin recessions with earnings, receipt of either Disability Insurance or Supplemental Security Income (DI-SSI) benefits, and mortality. Separate estimations are made for those who voluntarily and involuntarily left employment and the combined sample of these two groups. We find that 20 years later, long-term joblessness was associated with significantly lower earnings and higher likelihoods of the receipt of DI-SSI benefits as well as mortality.

Job and worker flows in the Finnish business sector are studied during a deep recession in the early 1990s. The data set covers effectively the whole work force. The gross job and worker flow rates are fairly high. The evidence suggests that the adjustment of labor input has happened through a reduced hiring rate rather than through an increased separation rate. However, during the recession the group of declining plants included more and larger plants than before, which led to reduced employment. Excess worker turnover (churning) and excess job reallocation have been low during the recession. The evidence of the countercyclicality of job reallocation is mixed. The flows are calculated both for the whole business sector, and for seven main industries. Services have clearly higher flow rates than manufacturing, but the cyclical changes in the flows are fairly similar in all industries. To test the sensitivity of the results to data sources, job flows are calculated from three different statistics.

We investigate in this paper whether income growth has played any role on inequality in all nine young South American democracies during the 1970–2007 period.

Given the nature of our dataset, the methodology is based on dynamic panel time-series analysis.

The results suggest that income growth has played a progressive role in reducing inequality during the period. Moreover, the results suggest that this negative relationship is stronger in the 1990s and early 2000s, a period in which the continent achieved macroeconomic stabilization, political consolidation, and much improved economic performance. On the contrary, during the 1980s (the so-called “lost decade”), the negative income growth experienced by the continent at the time has hit the poor the hardest (the poor usually are the ones to lose their jobs first in recessions), which has consequently led to an increase in inequality.

All in all, we suggest that consistent growth, and all that it encompasses, is an important equalizer that affects the poorer progressively and it should not be discarded as a plausible option by policy makers interested in a more equal income distribution.

This paper discusses certain issues relating to growth and development of the Malaysian economy. The highly open nature of the Malaysian economy and its vulnerability to external monetary shocks, as shown by mid‐1980s recession and financial crisis of 1997 necessitate a rethinking of strategies for sustainable development. This paper uses alternative perspectives from Islamic economics and good practice management principles as a basis for discussion.

This paper examines and analyses the TFPG performance of individual service industries in Singapore. TFPG of services were highly cyclical, indicating the overwhelming vagaries of external demand in this small and open economy. Although the TFPG of most services were dismal during 1976‐93, the rates were higher for the post‐1985 recession period, compared with those in the pre‐1985 recession years. This trend reflects the Government’s concerted efforts to upgrade the workforce and promote higher technology services. Besides, the service industries which did not conform to this trend had in common massive infrastructural investments which were primarily undertaken by government‐linked enterprises with a longer‐term interest of the economy at large. Thus it seems that the paternal role of government has a vital influence on Singapore’s TFPG performance. The study implies that the role of government could constitute an important factor in the estimation of TFPG, and in comparing TFPG among economies where government roles differ significantly.