Malaysia’s electronics industry—Are its best days behind it?

Professor Gregg Huff, Pembroke College, University of Oxford

Few would imagine that over the last four decades Malaysia could have advanced so rapidly in the absence of export-led growth based on the production of electronics and electrical goods. This article argues that for Malaysia, electronics and electrical goods exports have functioned as a staple much, as in earlier decades, tin, rubber, palm oil, and petroleum did.

Staples are a single commodity, or a few commodities, that dominate a country’s exports. As a leading sector, staples set the pace of growth and, because of the institutions and linkages that grow up around them, leave their particular imprint on an economy and society (Watkins, 1963, pp. 143–145; Caves, 1965 and 1971; Hirschman, 1989, pp. 217–219; Baldwin, 1956 and 1963). Often, staples are primary commodities whose production depends on abundant natural resources. Although less appreciated in the literature, staples can also be manufactures if they are central to exports and become a leading sector. In Malaysia, the production of electronics and electrical products utilized, not an abundance of natural resources like earlier staples, but abundant semi-skilled labour, which, with the settling of Malaysian frontier land and population increase, had become Malaysia’s main factor endowment.

Recently, Malaysian economic growth has slowed. Electronics and electrical products—which consist almost exclusively of their parts and components—have remained a main export, but many of these require no more that assembly and testing. To achieve continued rapid growth based on the electronics industry, Malaysia needs to move up the value chain to more skill-intensive, higher-value activities. This article draws attention to the Malaysian education system and argues that weak education is a major impediment to developing the skilled labour force that Malaysia needs for continued swift growth.

Export-led growth

After 1960, manufacturing for export, and the expanding domestic markets it helped to promote, transformed the structure of GDP in Malaysia from predominantly agricultural to industrial. The manufacture of the parts and components of electronics and electrical products became a major staple and assumed a corresponding centrality in Malaysian manufacturing and exports. Table 1 shows the great importance to Malaysian manufacturing of the fabrication of electronics and electrical goods. Between 1996 and 2007, manufactures accounted for over 80 per cent of Malaysian non-oil exports, and electronics and electrical goods were the mainstay of manufactured exports.

Table 1 Malaysia total exports, non-oil exports, manufactured exports, and electronics and electrical goods exports

as a percentage of manufactured exports, 1988-2022

Note: Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) 7 is Machinery and transport equipment. Its main components in Malaysian electronics and electrical goods exports are: SITC 75 Office machines and automatic data-processing machines, SITC 76 Telecommunications and sound-recording and reproducing apparatus and equipment, and SITC 77 Electrical machinery, apparatus and appliances not elsewhere specified (n.e.s.), and electrical parts thereof (including nonelectrical. counterparts, n.e.s., of electrical household-type equipment). Important at the three-digit level is SITC 776 Television picture tubes, cathode-ray (including video monitor cathode-ray tubes). SITC 87 is Professional, scientific and controlling instruments and apparatus, n.e.s. SITC 88 is Photographic apparatus, equipment and supplies and optical goods, n.e.s.; watches and clocks.
Source: I owe these data to Prema Chandra Athukorala who compiled them from the World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) database of the World Bank.

Electronics and electrical goods production in Malaysia, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, was powered by the expansion of world trade in Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) categories 75, 76, 77, 87 and 88. Together they account for most electronics and electrical goods in world trade. Between 1988 and 1996, world electronics and electrical goods exports grew at an annual average rate of 19.5 per cent and from 1996 and 2006 at 8.5 per cent. Malaysian GDP per capita expanded similarly although at a somewhat slower pace. Since 2006, however, world exports of electronics and electrical goods have slowed dramatically. For electronics and electrical goods to remain a Malaysian engine of growth, Malaysia must upgrade to higher value-added, more skill-intensive activities in the industry (Figure 1).

Figure 1 World electronics and electrical goods exports, 1988–2022

Source of data: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2025.

Until about 2006, electronics parts and components had strong growth potential, because of a rapid expansion of world trade, because of high income elasticities of demand, and because production is divisible into many specialized manufacturing processes. These divide between several locations according to varying labour intensity of production and wage costs. Scope to move from unskilled activities to more skilled and capital-intensive ones allow the possibility of factor endowments evolving and comparative advantage shifting towards higher value-added production. Investment in education and skills facilitates a shift towards more skilled jobs. These help to explain rising wages in some countries and, through linkages and spillover effects, promote a move away from an earlier heavy reliance on the venting of cheap labour and towards a broader domestic economic development.

Malaysia first began to produce electronics and electrical goods in the 1970s, marking a new phase in its growth. Figures 2 and 3 show annual data for GDP per capita and exports for periods ranging from 1960 to 2023. Between 1966 and 2007, real GDP per capita increased more than fivefold in Malaysia. Within the growth swings shown in the boxes in the figures, one can highlight episodes of even decade-long annual average per capita growth rates of as much as 5 per cent or 6 per cent. Until the 1997 Asian financial crisis, growth in Malaysia was broken only briefly during 1984 to 1987 by the ‘Look East’ emphasis on heavy industry. Between 1987 and 1997, when electronics had decisively replaced earlier staples as a leading sector, Malaysia grew at 6.3 per cent annually. However, after the Asian financial crisis, and even more after 2006, the growth of GDP per capita in Malaysia slowed markedly as the expansion of electronics and electrical exports decelerated. The slowing emphasizes the need to move towards higher value-added activities in the production of electronics and electrical goods. From 2010 to 2019, Malaysian growth was 3.3 per cent and from 2019 to 2023 1.2 per cent.

Figure 2 Malaysia growth periods GDP per capita, 1960–2023

Source of data: World Bank, World Development Indicator, 2025.

Figure 3 Malaysia exports of goods and services, 1960–2023

Source of data: World Bank, World Development Indicator, 2025.

Global value chains

Most of the export-oriented manufacturing in Malaysia based on electronics and electrical goods was in the production, assembly, and testing of parts and components. Becoming part of this industry meant joining global value chains—a sequence of production leading to the sale of a final product and typically involving a number of different countries and firms. Plugging into the global value chains entails participation in an international putting-out system based on specialization and a division of labour according to its differential costs. Suitably low wage levels are fundamental to initially becoming part of global value chains.

The fabrication of electronics components and component assembly into final products incorporates inputs sourced from multiple locations. Most are Southeast Asian or Asian but also include North American, Mexican, and European inputs. The production chain may be long and go through several stages, a process of regional specialization and integration that maximizes the venting of labour. Southeast Asian countries trade among themselves and, according to labour costs and skills, specialize in specific stages of the production process. In intra-Southeast Asian and Asian trade, a component or input may be exported after the performance of one production stage and, following the end of a second, be imported for a further production stage. The break-up of production into geographically separate stages means that components even for a particular stage may come from multiple suppliers.

Once Malaysia was incorporated in electronics value chains, multinationals oversaw production and assured access to overseas markets by arranging the export of final output, either for further work or to mainly developed-country markets. Multinationals typically specified products, or often components of them, and provided design technology, generally located outside Malaysia. At first, all that Malaysia needed to do, at a minimum, was to furnish land for production as well as appropriately cheap labour, including technicians, engineers, and mid-level managers. The challenge was to assume more of the production process and move towards higher value-added, more skill-intensive activities.

Within a value chain, product and process upgrading means increasing the number of product lines and, for electronics and electrical goods, is essentially a widening of production. Deepening involves functional upgrading of moving up a global value chain to higher value-added activities. These decisively push a country forward towards development. In Southeast Asia, functional upgrading has occurred mainly in Singapore.

Global electronics industry

The global electronics industry divides into the three tiers: lead firms, contract manufacturers/tier 1 suppliers, and component manufacturers. The three divisions of global value chains correspond approximately to the scope to add value along a chain.

Lead firms are multinationals and they research, invent, brand, and market products—for example, Apple, Lenovo, Dell, and Samsung. Contract manufacturers/tier 1 suppliers, of which the Taiwanese firm Foxconn is the largest, are also usually multinationals. They produce final goods according to the specifications of lead firms and in doing so provide electronics manufacturing services such as the purchase of components, final assembly, and possibly also design. As well as Foxconn, other large contract manufacturers in Southeast Asia are Flex, Jabil Circuit, Celestica, and Sanmina-SCI. Flex, formerly Flextronics and with headquarters in Austin, Texas, has 12 facilities in Malaysia, a presence built up with major tax incentives.

Flex facilities built in Malaysia with tax incentives
Source: The Vibes, March 2022.

At the bottom of the tiers are numerous component manufacturers. These firms have relatively little market power and generally sell to contract manufactures, which fulfil production contracts for lead firms (Sturgeon and Kawakami, 2011, pp. 124–129, and 2010, pp. 10–20; Frederick and Gereffi, 2016, pp. v–vi, 10–42; Raj-Reichert, 2020, pp. 701–702, 707–709).

Moving up a value chain towards higher value-added activities through functional upgrading requires abundant human capital with a mix of university graduate and postgraduate degrees as well as appropriate skills. Even given these, functional upgrading is difficult because of an industry modularity of a clear separation of functions between research and design, manufacturing and assembly of final products, and fabrication. Industry modularity is reinforced by the usual practice of lead firms to undertake higher value-added activities at corporate headquarters or design centres. South Korea and China have established lead electronics firms, but Southeast Asian countries have not (Sturgeon and Kawakami, 2011, pp. 124–129, and 2010, pp. 10–20; Frederick and Gereffi, 2016, pp. v–vi, 10–42; Raj-Reichert, 2020, pp. 701–702, 707–709). In Malaysia, participation in global electronics value chains is mainly confined to component manufacture and assembly.

Malaysian electronics industry

Electronics and electrical goods production began in the northern Malaysian state of Penang in the late 1960s, soon after it started in Singapore (Koay, 2024). In the 1970s, under the Second Malaysia Plan of 1971–1975 (an improvement on the Investment Incentives Act, 1968), Malaysia established free trade zones to attract multinationals that were relocating low-wage electronics and electrical operations from more developed countries, including Singapore. In addition, the Second Plan offered government incentives such as pioneer status, investment tax credits, and tax holidays (EPU-M, 1971, pp. 91, 149–158). Job creation was a main focus of the Second Plan, because in 1970 Malaysian unemployment was about 8 per cent and the number of job seekers joining the labour force was rapidly increasing. The aim in Malaysia was to create jobs such that ‘Unemployment and underemployment will then cease to be factors tying down large numbers of Malaysians to poverty’ (EPU-M, 1971, p. 5; and see p. 15).

In the 1970s, an initial wave of electronics multinationals setting up in Malaysia included Texas Instruments, Intel, Motorola, and Hewlett Packard. By 1980, 25 electronics factories operated in four free trade zones in Penang, and Malaysia was the world’s largest exporter of semiconductors (Hutchinson, 2008, p. 228; Raj-Reichert, 2020, p. 702). During the 1980s, Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese multinationals were attracted to Malaysia because of currency appreciation after the 1985 Plaza Accord raised wages in their home countries. In 2005, Malaysia had some 200 multinational electronics firms employing 110,000 workers and 350 downstream firms employing 25,000 people (Hutchinson, 2008, p. 224).

The growth of the electronics industry in Malaysia in the late 1960s
Source: EHM website, 2019.

Between the end of the 1990s and 2014, some firms in Malaysia, supported by government grants, began chip and wafer fabrication, but the pace of functional upgrading has remained slow, constrained by a chronic lack of human capital and a poor technological environment (Rasiah, 2017, pp. 134–140; Edgington and Hayter, 2013, pp. 227, 248–250). Semiconductor production constitutes three-fifths of the Malaysian electronics and electrical industry, and Malaysia is the world’s sixth-largest chip exporter—positions on which the Malaysia 2030 Industrial Plan looks to build. The goal is functionally to upgrade by establishing more advanced semiconductor design capabilities and attracting a leading firm in wafer fabrication (MITI, 2023, pp. 49–72).

Despite a well-established electronics industry, disk-drive assembly in Malaysia began only in 1988, partly because it was previously discouraged by Prime Minister Mahathir’s 1980s ‘Look East’ strategy for heavy industrialization. After 1988, a Penang disk-drive cluster grew rapidly. Maxtor was typical in its reasons for moving to Penang as an extension of Singapore operations. Rising land and labour costs in Singapore created savings for Maxtor that allowed it to recoup in six months the cost of investing in Penang. The alertness of, and subsidies from, the Penang Development Corporation created first-mover advantages that helped to ensure that disk-drive production located chiefly in Penang, not neighbouring Perak (McKendrick et al., 2000, p. 190).

Bayan Lepas Free Industrial Zone, Penang
Source: Wikipedia, 2024.

Migrant labour

The Malaysian economy, including the electronics and electrical industry, has increasingly become dependent on large inward migration for supplies of cheap labour, and on illegal migration. In 2017, Malaysia had some 3 million legal foreign workers, most of whom came from Indonesia and Bangladesh, in addition to an estimated 1.5 million irregular—essentially illegal—foreign workers, according to the World Bank. Other estimates, however, put the figure of illegal foreign workers as high as 4 million (World Bank, 2020, pp. viii–ix, 45). Irregular workers are defined as illegal entrants, persons not authorized to work although they were legal entrants, overstayers, and refugees and asylum seekers who seek employment. The foreign workforce in Malaysia, according to the World Bank estimate, was about 15 per cent of the total labour force, but the share could be higher depending on the true number of irregular workers.

Most foreign workers are low skilled and are engaged in basic services, agriculture, and manufacturing. Although migrants from poorer Asian countries have proved prepared to go to Malaysia to take low-wage jobs in the electronics industry, the downwards effect on wages of these inflows has been partly responsible for large numbers of Malaysians who are reluctant to take low-skilled and low-paid jobs choosing to remain in the countryside and semi-rural areas.

Education and development

Beneficial and necessary as educational expansion can be, it has not served Malaysian economic development well. Malaysia’s five-year development plans have long aspired to increase the supply of highly skilled manpower. However, this crucial outcome has remained elusive and in practice there has been an overemphasis on widening education to ensure its greater accessibility but with insufficient attention both to educational deepening through the quality of instruction and the demand for skilled personnel.

In Malaysia from the late 1980s, there was a rapid expansion in both public and private higher education institutions. In 2014, public sector higher education in Malaysia had expanded to include 20 universities classified as research institutions, 33 polytechnics, 91 community colleges, and 14 higher institution centres of excellence (Selvaratnam, 2016, p. 210). By 2020, Malaysia had some 160 public universities, polytechnics, and community colleges.

The Malaysian government also liberalized higher education to allow private providers. By 2020, Malaysia had about 435 private colleges and universities. These include international branch campuses of foreign universities, such as Nottingham University (UK), Monash University (Australia), and Xiamen University (China). In 1996, the Private Higher Educational Institutions Act allowed the use of English as the medium of instruction in twinning programmes and branch campuses of foreign universities. Enrolment in private higher education institutes now exceeds that in public institutions. Malay students predominate at the public institutions, which are mostly Malay-medium, while non-Malay students are in the majority at private institutions, many of which are English-medium (Sultan Nazrin Shah, 2019, pp. 131–34; Hawati Abdul Hamid, 2022, p. 13).

Malaysia has not used this impressive educational widening to produce a workforce well suited to development, partly because of the emphasis on quantity, partly due to the ‘wrong kind’ of education, and partly owing to relatively few university–industry links (Intarakumnerd and Jutarosaga, 2023, pp. 266–273, 279; Rattanakhamfu, 2023, pp. 283–284). Malaysian education, with legacies of a British system, is largely academic, not vocational, and chiefly in the social sciences and humanities.

Malaysian universities and vocational schools have been unable to supply firms with enough capable engineers and workers, and this has held back development in electronics. Despite an established and large presence in Malaysia, contract manufacturers—as they upgrade into higher value-added functions, in particular design and engineering—have chosen to locate those functions in China, not Malaysia. These decisions point to a lack of skills, in particular engineers, in Malaysia (Raj-Reichert, 2020, p. 710).

A decade and a half ago, an official enquiry concluded that key to explaining sluggish growth was an inability to participate in the knowledge economy and a ‘lack of appropriately skilled human capital’ (NEAC, 2010, p. 44). In 2010, 80 per cent of the Malaysian workforce had received an education up to only the secondary level (the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia equivalent to the English ‘O level’), and the share of skilled workers employed in Malaysian industries has increased only modestly. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 showed that Malaysian test results were well below levels associated with a country with a per capita income as high as Malaysia’s (World Bank, 2019, pp. 30, 38; Tham and Chong, 2023, pp. 243–244; Lee, 2023, p. 262). Further, Malaysia’s scores in the 2022 PISA were even worse than those of 2018. In 2025, the best university in Malaysia was ranked between 201 to 250 in the Times Higher Education world university rankings.

Education in Malaysia is held back by language policy. After the implementation of the New Economic Policy in the 1970s, Malays and other Bumiputera gained preferential university entry, and since 1983 Malay has been the language of instruction for the entire public education system. While Malays, especially in rural areas, benefit from this language policy, and it could be defended on grounds of national unity, Malay as the language of instruction compromised economic development in two fundamental respects.

One was largely to cut off Malaysian education from global technological discourse. Prominent among Malay students was ‘the inability or unwillingness of many to deal with English. Opportunities were lost to function in English which is currently the global language of research, publication, scientific discourse and electronics communication and a tool for increasing mobility. Students regurgitated lecture notes, reluctant to refer to English-language texts, journals and sources of reference … Unless political measures support the widespread use of English, the engagement of young Malaysians in global knowledge creation will continue to be limited’ (Mukherjee and Wong, 2011, p. 135; see also Selvaratnam, 2016, p. 206). Competition in university staffing is essentially limited to Malays, who hold almost all university senior management, administrative, and academic positions (Selvaratnam, 2016, p. 203).

A second main effect of Malaysian language policy was a large outflow of human capital among Chinese and Indians. The 2010 National Economic Advisory Council concluded that ‘We are not developing talent and what we have is leaving. The human capital situation in Malaysia is reaching a critical stage [and] outward migration of skilled Malaysians is rising rapidly’ (NEAC, 2010, p. 6; and see p. 54). Malaysian Chinese students go, if possible, to universities in other countries, and because many never return there is a brain drain.

Way forward

In Malaysia, the expansion of electronics and electrical manufacturing drew on a large supply of cheap, unskilled labour available through pools of low-wage domestic workers as well as through the transfer of labour out of agriculture and low-productivity services. As the depletion of domestic labour supply made it less elastic, a rise in wages should be matched by technical progress to increase labour productivity. To some extent this happened. For much of Malaysia’s electronics and electrical goods production, however, inflows of low-wage, foreign workers forestalled higher wages and increased productivity in the existing labour force as an adjustment mechanism.

The reliance by Malaysia on migration from poorer Asian countries to supply a large, low-wage, low-value-added unskilled industrial workforce perpetuates a cheap labour—often largely assembly—electronics manufacturing sector. It discourages transition to a higher-skill, higher-wage economy through setting up wage pressure for the technical change that moves an economy towards self-sustaining economic growth.

Malaysia also lacks an educational and institutional framework conducive to social capability and thus continued growth and development. As labour comes under pressure from cheaper cost locations and is expelled from low-wage manufacturing, development requires workers to have the skills to move to higher-tech activities. Malaysia has, however, shortages of skilled industrial labour. Cybercity, built near the end of the twentieth century to launch a digital revolution, was still mainly warehouses in 2025. Most Cybercity technicians come from India on contracts. And as seen, Malaysian education supresses a diffusion of global knowledge and ideas through instruction mainly in Malay rather than English, the international language of science and communication.

The Malaysian government is well aware of the need for the more skilled labour that a better education system would yield. So far, however, measures to produce such a system have not been implemented. In 2024, the Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz emphasized that: ‘We must transition from merely being a production centre to becoming a leader in innovation and technology development’. The Minister elaborated: ‘A key concern is the issue of “brain drain”. Many of our skilled professionals are migrating to Singapore, the US, China, and Taiwan due to limited job opportunities in Malaysia’s high-tech sectors. To address this, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) is working to attract more technology companies that can offer high-quality jobs to Malaysians. We do not want to be just a country that provides labour’ (Malay Mail, 2024).

Indeed, in its electronics and electrical industry, Malaysia cannot afford to let itself be trapped in a cheap labour role. If it does, the best days for Malaysia of the industry will be behind it.

References

Baldwin, R. E. 1956. ‘Patterns of Development in Newly Settled Regions’. The Manchester School, 24/2, pp. 161–179.

______ 1963. ‘Export Technology and Development from a Subsistence Level’. The Economic Journal, 73/289, pp. 80–92.

Caves, R. E. 1965. ‘“Vent for Surplus” Models of Trade and Growth’, in Baldwin, R. E. et al. (eds), Trade, Growth and the Balance of Payments. Chicago: Rand McNally, pp. 95–115.

______ 1971. ‘Export-led Growth and the New Economic History’, in Bhagwati, J. N. et al. (eds), Trade, Balance of Payments and Growth. Amsterdam: North Holland, pp. 403–442.

Economic Planning Unit–Malaysia (EPU–M). 1971. Second Malaysia Plan, 1971–1975. Kuala Lumpur: Government Printers.

Edgington, D. and Hayter, R. 2013. ‘The In Situ Upgrading of Japanese Electronics Firms in Malaysian Industrial Clusters’. Economic Geography, 89/3, pp. 227–259.

Frederick, S. and Gereffi, G. 2016. The Philippines in the Electronics & Electrical Global Value Chain. Durham. NC: Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness, Duke University. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/88a06165-8a8e-462b-a2c1-1a3d29f7fb49

Hawati Abdul Hamid. 2022. Malaysian Higher Education and Economic Growth: A Causality Analysis. Working paper 3/22, 28 October. Kuala Lumpur: Khazanah Research Institute.

Hirschman, A. O. 1989. ‘Linkages’, in Eatwell, J., Milgate, M. and Newman, P. (eds), The New Palgrave: Economic Development. London: Macmillan, pp. 210–221.

Hutchinson, F. E. 2008. ‘“Developmental” States and Economic Growth at the Sub-national Level: The Case of Penang’. Southeast Asian Affairs, pp. 223–244.

Intarakumnerd, P. and Jutarosaga, A. 2023. ‘The Evolution of University–Industry Linkages in Thailand’. Asian Economic Policy Review, 18/2, pp. 265–282.

Koay S. L. 2024. Penang’s Industrialization and Economic Transformation, 1960s to 1980s. https://www.ehm.my/publications/articles/penangs-industrialization-and-economic-transformation-1960s-to-1980s.

Lee, C. 2023. ‘Comment on “Transforming Malaysia’s Higher Education: Policies and Progress”’.Asian Economic Policy Review, 18/2, pp. 261–2.

Malay Mail. 2024. ‘Malaysia Takes Nvidia AI Chip Smuggling Claims to China Seriously’. 7 February.

National Economic Advisory Council–Malaysia (NEAC). 2010. New Economic Model for Malaysia, Part I. Putrajaya: NEAC.

Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry, Malaysia (MITI). 2023. New Industrial Master Plan 2030. Kuala Lumpur: MITI.

McKendrick, D. G., Doner, R. F. and Haggard, S. 2000, From Silicon Valley to Singapore: Location and Competitive Advantage in the Hard Disk Drive Industry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Mukherjee, H. and Wong, P. K. 2011. ‘The National University of Singapore and the University of Malaya: Common Roots and Different Paths’, in Altbach, P. G., and Salmi, J. (eds), The Road to Academic Excellence: The Making of World-Class Research Universities. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, pp. 129–166.

Raj-Reichert, G. 2020. ‘Global Value Chains, Contract Manufacturers, and the Middle-Income Trap: The Electronics Industry in Malaysia’.Journal of Development Studies, 56/4, pp. 698–716.

Rasiah, R. 2017. ‘The Industrial Policy Experience of the Electronics Industry in Malaysia’, in Page, J. and Tarp, F. (eds), The Practice of Industrial Policy: Government–Business Coordination in Africa and East Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 123–144.

Rattanakhamfu, S. 2023. ‘Comment on “The Evolution of University–Industry Linkages in Thailand”’. Asian Economic Policy Review, Vol. 18, pp. 283–284.

Selvaratnam, V. 2016. ‘Malaysia’s Higher Education and Quest for Developed Nation Status by 2020’, in Singh, D. and Cook, M. (eds), Southeast Asian Affairs 2016, Singapore: ISEAS.

Sturgeon, T. and Kawakami, M. 2010. Global Value Chains in the Electronics Industry. Policy Research Working Paper 5417. Washington D.C.: World Bank.

______ 2011. ‘Global Value Chains in the Electronics Industry: Characteristics, Crisis, and Upgrading Opportunities for Firms from Developing Countries’. International Journal of Technological Learning Innovation and Development, 4/1, pp. 120–147.

Sultan Nazrin Shah. 2019. Striving for Inclusive Development: From Pangkor to a Modern Malaysian State. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

Tham, S. Y. and Chong, P. Y. 2023. ‘Transforming Malaysia’s Higher Education: Policies and Progress’. Asian Economic Policy Review, Vol. 18, pp. 243–260.

Watkins, M. H. 1963. ‘A Staple Theory of Economic Growth.’ Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 29, pp. 141–158.

World Bank. 2019. PISA 2018: Programme for International Student Assessment, East Asia and Pacific Regional Brief. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.

______ 2020. Who Is Keeping Score?: Estimating the Number of Foreign Workers in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: World Bank Group.

______ 2025. World Development Indicators 2025. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.