Malaysia is a country located in Southeast Asia with a total population of about 32 million and a land area of about 330,000 square kilometers. It is a relatively typical Southeast Asian country.
is such a country. Even though its per capita GDP in 2021 was greatly affected by the epidemic, it still reached US$11,125, and the total scale of GDP is about US$370 billion.
However, Malaysia does not have any very powerful industries, why is the per capita GDP level so high?
01 What exactly does Malaysia's economy depend on?
For a long time, the Chinese people don’t seem to be deeply impressed by this Southeast Asian country. But it is undeniable that Malaysia's economic development has performed extremely strongly.
on the one hand benefits from its rich resources, and on the other hand, it benefits from its development strategy and positioning. It is precisely because of the combined effect of these two factors that Malaysia's economic level has developed better.
Malaysia's first pillar industry is the service industry, accounting for more than 50% of its GDP. In 2018, before the outbreak of the epidemic, Malaysia's tourism industry once accounted for 12% of GDP, and at the same time created nearly one-quarter of its jobs.
However, it is worth noting that Malaysia's main tourist sources come from Singapore and Indonesia , while China ranks third.
Among the foreign tourists in Malaysia, Singapore accounts for a very important proportion. In 2018, there were more than 10 million tourists to Malaysia, which is the second place Indonesian and third place China. In some sense, Malaysia's tourism industry is highly dependent on Singapore's tourists.
In this process, these two countries actually formed a mutually beneficial and win-win relationship, because as one of the best economic development in Asia, Singapore's strong consumption capacity plays a very important role in Malaysia's tourism industry and has greatly promoted its development.
From the perspective of economic structure, although tourism occupies a "place" in Malaysia and may dominate the future in its government's planning.
However, from a practical perspective, due to the huge impact of the epidemic, the international tourism industry will obviously experience a long-term downturn, which is undoubtedly a very difficult thing for Malaysia.
This point is well reflected in Malaysia's economy. After the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, Malaysia's GDP fell directly by more than 5 percentage points. Although is closely related to the deterioration of the global economy, to some extent it is also a direct reflection of the impact of the epidemic on its tourism industry.
In addition to the service industry, Malaysia has another pillar industry.
Thanks to the rich domestic rubber production and mineral reserves, Malaysia has always been one of the important production areas of the semiconductor industry and rubber-related products. has 54 semiconductor manufacturing industries in China, accounting for 8% of the global back-end semiconductor packaging market.
and are also the third largest natural rubber producer and exporter in the world. Together with Thailand and Indonesia, they occupy half of the rubber market.
In addition, Malaysia also has relatively abundant oil and natural gas reserves, with proven crude oil reserves reaching 3.6 billion barrels, making it one of the important export countries for liquefied natural gas and oil in Southeast Asia.
From the above brief introduction, it is not difficult to see that although Malaysia has a small population and a small land area, it has a relatively rich natural resources on the one hand. By mining minerals, planting rubber, and mining oil and natural gas, it can obtain certain funds through foreign trade.
At the same time, Malaysia also plans to tertiary industry , and the tourism industry has developed relatively well.Relying on the tourist resources of Singapore and other countries, its cultural and tourism industry is also relatively large in scale and has achieved good development.
At the same time, in the high-tech industry, Malaysia has built a large number of semiconductor factories by introducing foreign capital. This is also regarded as one of the important industries in its future development.
From this point of view, Malaysia's economy is showing diversified development, and it is not surprising that per capita GDP level is much higher than that of Indonesia and other neighboring countries.
02 Malaysia's "hugging the thighs" strategy
In fact, if you want to understand Malaysia's economy, you can use a very simple word to describe it as "hugging the thighs".
1957, Malaysia was independent. In the years that followed, it has been deeply influenced by ethnic issues. Today's Singapore was once a part of Malaysia, but later declared independence in 1965 due to conflicts between the two sides.
Since then, Singapore has embarked on the high-tech industry route, while Malaysia has tightly embraced a "golden thigh", which is Japan.
After Japan was defeated in World War II , relying on the condolence of the United States, it soon emerged from the adverse effects of the war. This is especially reflected in the economic aspects.
From 1950 to 1970, Japan first achieved reconstruction of the industrial foundation and economic development by releasing orders for Korean War and Vietnam War .
Then, starting from 1970, Japan focused on the manufacturing industry and needed to import a large amount of raw materials. At this time, Malaysia began to choose to follow Japan itself, becoming its important raw material procurement market.
At that time, Japan's key industries began to transform from the original steel industry to the automobile manufacturing industry. The automobile manufacturing industry obviously not only needs to produce cars, but also includes fuel, tires and other industries.
At this time, Malaysia, which has rich oil and gas reserves and rubber production, is obviously a good choice.
At this time, Malaysia hugged Japan's "golden thighs". With the "Shenwu Prosperity" in the last century, Malaysia also developed rapidly, with an average annual economic growth rate of more than 10% in the 1990s. Obviously, during this period, with the help of Japan, Malaysia gained the "first pot of gold" in economic development.
With the strengthening of economic and trade exchanges with Japan, Malaysia has gradually transformed rapidly towards a resource-exporting country. National economic growth and its dependence on foreign trade, especially trade with Japan. Although it has achieved rapid development, it has also led to its "innate deficiency" economic development pattern.
In this process, some Japanese industries began to be eliminated and transformed, and low-end manufacturing began to flow out to Malaysia, and it gradually began to develop some low-end industries from the original resource-based countries. During this period, Malaysians showed their expectations for the future and hoped to become a developed country in 2020.
However, with Japan signing the Plaza Agreement in the 1990s, it eventually led to the bursting of Japan's domestic economic bubble in 1997. , which was originally booming in Japan, suddenly plummeted and saw a sharp decline. Malaysia, which was holding Japanese thighs, also fell into stagnation.
Later in 1997, the international hot money led by Soros "killed all sides" in Southeast Asia. Although the Malaysian government responded properly and did not surrender, the domestic economy also stagnated.
Until this time, Malaysia's economic model was still mainly low-end OEM, and its main focus was labor-intensive industry .
However, as a large number of foreign companies began to flock to China, the best times in Malaysia have passed. From a population perspective, Malaysia has a population of 30 million, while China has a population of more than 1 billion.
And population means the number of workers, With the rise of China's manufacturing industry, Malaysia's low-end OEM has suffered an almost devastating blow, and the dream of becoming a developed country has gone away.
Obviously, the decision to "hugg" helped Malaysia obtain a large number of orders from Japan, and at the same time it also made the economic forms between Malaysia and Japan highly converge. In the end, when Japan faced the economic crisis, , Malaysia was unable to survive.
Although Malaysia's economic development was large during this period, its industrial structure was not very good and its technical level was not high. It was inevitable that the manufacturing industry would face sluggishness. Malaysia's economy can be said to be "hugging the thigh" for success and failure.
But fortunately, after losing Japan's golden thigh, Malaysia has another silver thigh, which is Singapore, which was independent from Malaysia at that time.
In the 1980s, Malaysia and Singapore embarked on two different paths. Malaysia focuses on low-end industries, while Singapore focuses on high-end manufacturing, technology and finance industries.
Singapore and Malaysia started to develop the semiconductor industry from the end of the last century, and gradually became one of the important semiconductor manufacturers in the world. Although
is now facing the impact of China's manufacturing industry, it is still one of the important production sites.
It is not difficult to see from the previous article that Malaysia's thighs this time are different from the previous Japanese thighs.
The domestic manufacturing industry structure has undergone a more obvious upgrade compared to the previous low-end industries, and the overall economic structure of the country is also more reasonable.
Tourism has become one of its pillar industries. Even if there are some impacts in the manufacturing industry, it will not lead to serious consequences, and its risk resistance has been strengthened to a certain extent. This has a relatively positive significance for the development of its economy.
However, Malaysia's economy is highly dependent on foreign trade and tourism, and overall it still shows a high dependence on the outside world. However, from the perspective of economic development level, Malaysia is indeed doing a good job.
03 The future of Malaysia's economy under the epidemic era
In fact, if Malaysia proceeds with economic development step by step, it can maintain high water growth. But the arrival of the epidemic is obviously unfortunate news for this small Southeast Asian country.
So in the era of epidemic, where should Malaysia go?
On the one hand, the economic structure has led to the Malaysian economy being extremely dependent on foreign trade and tourism.
The above industries have relatively good development prospects under the globalization. We can also see that Malaysia hopes to change its own resource-exporting country, and this attempt is obviously more appropriate.
With the spread of the epidemic worldwide and the rise of trade protectionism . Both the two major economic pillars of Malaysia's foreign trade and tourism industry have been affected to varying degrees.
Among them, in terms of foreign trade, Malaysia encountered a severe winter in 2020. Its total foreign trade volume fell by 3.6 percentage points compared with 2019. Although the economic and trade relations with China are showing a positive trend, the epidemic factors still have a serious impact on it.
At the same time, the epidemic has also affected the source of foreign tourists and posed severe challenges to Malaysia's tourism industry.
Under the dual influence, in 2020, Malaysia's GDP fell by about 5 percentage points compared with 2019. The pain caused by the epidemic has a relatively large impact.
plus Malaysia's domestic welfare security system is relatively good, and medical and financial expenditures still have great pressure on the country.
Looking forward to this small Southeast Asian country getting rid of the shadow of the epidemic as soon as possible and embarking on its own right path.
