Accelerated industrialization and employment opportunities in Malaysia

Malaysia is emerging as one of the most rapidly developing newly industrialized countries in the 1980s, mainly because it has pursued a strategy that is based on highly capital-intensive and export-oriented types of industries, financed by foreign capital and supported by a wide range of fiscal incentives. There has been, however, very little concern for the types and range of employment opportunities available. Based on unskilled labour, low wages and slow rates of employment absorption, this form of “industrialization-by-invitation” will in turn speed up processes or urbanization through rural-urban migration and create socio-economic problems of large city growth in the country.