This book studies the impact of public expenditure allocations in achieving income equality goals in Malaysia. The book examines the initial functional and institutional distribution of income across different institutional agents and sectors and evaluates the impact of the public expenditure policies in reducing the inter-ethnic and rural–urban disparity. Since Malaysia has made enormous progress in eliminating poverty, the authors suggest that a change of emphasis in the public expenditure policy may now be called for. They present evidence on the importance of public expenditure in improving income inequality and examine the initial functional and institutional distribution of income across different institutional agents and sectors. The development of the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) model that presents both economic and social statistics in an economy can be served as a useful tool of this work. The SAM model is used to evaluate the impact of the public expenditure policies in reducing inter-ethnic and rural–urban disparity. A comprehensive source of information on how to deal with inequality economic challenges, the book will be of interest to economists and researchers on Southeast Asian Studies.

Originally published in 1982 The Strategy of Equality examines public expenditure on the social services as a strategy for promoting social equality. Today there is a widespread belief that the strategy has worked and that public spending on the social services primarily benefits those less well off. However, there have been few attempts to examine whether this belief is founded in reality. This book attempts to rectify this. Examining four areas of social policy: health care, education, housing, and transport, the book looks at the distribution of public expenditure and the ‘outcome’ of that expenditure, as well as the implications for various conceptions of equality.

Routledge Library Editions: Development will re-issue works which address economic, political and social aspects of development. Published over more than four decades these books trace the emergence of development as one of the most important contemporary issues and one of the key areas of study for modern social science. The books cover the most important themes within development and include studies of Latin America, Africa and Asia. Authors include Sir Alexander Cairncross, W. Arthur Lewis, Lord Peter Bauer and Cristobal Kay. An extensive collection of previously hard to access or out of print books, this set presents an unrivalled opportunity to build up a wealth of material in the field of development studies, with a particular focus upon economic and political concerns. The volumes in the collection offer both a global overview of the history of development in the twentieth century, and a huge variety of case studies on the development of individual nations. For institutional purchases for e-book sets please contact online.sales@tandf.co.uk (customers in the UK, Europe and Rest of World)

Asia’s rapid economic growth has led to a significant reduction in extreme poverty, but accompanied by rising inequality. This book deals with three questions: What have been the trends of inequality in Asia and the Pacific? What are the key drivers of rising inequality in the region? How should Asian countries respond to the rising inequality? Technological change, globalization, and market-oriented reform have been the key drivers of Asia’s remarkable growth and poverty reduction, but they have also had significant distribution consequences. These three drivers of growth cannot be hindered because they are the sources of productivity improvement and betterment of quality of life. This book will be useful to those interested in policy options that could be deployed by Asian countries in confronting rising inequality.

Benefit incidence analysis offers an important perspective on budgets and can illuminate the distributional impacts of proposed reallocations of government resources among projects.

This paper provides a primer on benefit incidence analysis (BIA) for macroeconomists and a new data set on the benefit incidence of education and health spending covering 56 countries over 1960-2000, representing a significant improvement in quality and coverage over existing compilations. The paper demonstrates the usefulness of BIA in two dimensions. First, the paper finds, among other things, that overall education and health spending are poorly targeted; benefits from primary education and primary health care go disproportionately to the middle class, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, HIPCs and transition economies; but targeting has improved in the 1990s. Second, simple measures of association show that countries with a more propoor incidence of education and health spending tend to have better education and health outcomes, good governance, high per capita income, and wider accessibility to information. The paper explores policy implications of these findings.

This book attempts to understand economic developments in Malaysia in the early and mid-Eighties, focusing on growth, balance of payments, fiscal and debt trends. They are all seen against global trends, earlier developments in the Malaysian economy and other changes in Malaysian society.

Malaysia has grown and changed a great deal since it was formed on 16 September 1963. It was then seen as an unlikely nation hastily put together as a federation of British controlled territories in the region. Brunei's refusal to join at the eleventh hour and Singapore's secession before its second birthday only seemed to confirm such doubts.Yet, it has not only survived, but even thrived, often cited as a developing country worthy of emulation. Ruled by the same ruling coalition since the mid-1950s, it has been tempting to emphasize continuities, and there certainly have been many.Looking back at its last half century, this volume first considers changes in development policy in response to national as well as international developments. The remaining three parts consider how public policy has been influenced by and has, in turn, influenced economic distribution, public finance and economic federalism.Besides the familiar focus on ethnic disparities, regional and other distribution issues are considered. The discussion of government taxation as well as spending also focuses on distribution implications. Although constitutionally a federation, Malaysia has been more centralized than most federal states.The way forward requires greater sensitivity to the complex political economy of Malaysia's unlikely, but nonetheless resilient federation and ruling coalition.This book is published and distributed worldwide by World Scientific Publishing Co Pte Ltd except Malaysia.

This book started with an objective to understand the impact of high inflation on poverty and food security in Southeast Asia. However, the global economy moved quickly into recession in 2008. Anticipating that the impact of global recession would be more severe than that of high inflation in Southeast Asia, we re-focused the title of the book to Poverty, Food, and Global Recession in Southeast Asia. By early 2010, people were already optimistic that the global recession was over or would be over soon. However, the evidence was mounting that the poor had suffered and were still suffering from the current global crisis, even if the richer individuals may have recovered. Therefore, an important question arises, Is the crisis really over for the poor? This then became the sub-title of this book. This book aims to contribute a better understanding on poverty and food security in Southeast Asia during the recent global recession considering both recent developments and the previous major crisis of 1997-98.