This book explores privatization in Malaysia, focusing in particular on how political constraints resulted in the failure of four major privatizations: the national sewerage company (IWK), Kuala Lumpur Light Rail Transit (LRT), national airline (MAS), and national car company (Proton).

In this first critical, multidisciplinary assessment of recent privatization in a developing country, the contributors offer valuable lessons for the comparative study of denationalization and related public policy options. After an introductory survey, the volume presents broad perspectives on the context, formulation, and adjustment of privatization policy in Malaysia. The contributors review the distributional implications of specific privatizations for the public interest as well as for consumer and employee welfare. The book concludes with an examination of the economic, political, and cultural impacts of the privatization of physical infrastructure, telecommunications, and television programming.

In recent years, privatisation has fallen out of favour in many countries because the underlying political factors have not been well understood. This book examines Malaysia’s privatisation programme, focusing on how political constraints resulted in the failure of four major privatisations: the national sewerage company (IWK), Kuala Lumpur Light Rail Transit (LRT), national airline (MAS), and national car company (Proton). It considers why developing countries such as Malaysia might want to embark on privatisation, the factors that lead to policy failure, and what is needed to make it work. It shows clearly that political motives driving privatisation often dominate purely economic considerations, and thus it is necessary to analyse privatisation within the specific country context. It argues that failure in the Malaysian case was due to political considerations that compromised institutional design and regulatory enforcement, leading to problems associated with corruption. It concludes that privatisation does not necessarily improve incentives for efficiency or enhance the finance available for capital investment, and that successful privatisation depends on the state’s institutional and political capacity to design and manage an appropriate set of subsidies. Overall, this book is a comprehensive examination of privatisation in Malaysia, providing important insights for understanding the political economy of this process in other developing countries.

As the first comprehensive study on privatization in Malaysia, this paper compares financial and operating performance of a sample of 24 firms before and after privatization. The 24 firms were privatized via public listing on the Malaysian exchange. Measures that improve following privatization include profitability, output level, and dividend payout; leverage declines. We also observe increased linkages between ownership and corporate governance with such performance changes. By and large, our results are similar to the results of the directly comparable multi-country studies of Megginson, Nash, and van Randenborgh (1994), Boubakri and Cosset (1998), and D'Souza and Megginson (1999).

This paper examines the role that privatization can play within a wider strategy designed to overcome the problems associated with public enterprises. For this purpose, privatization is defined as a transfer of ownership and control from the public to the private sector, with particular reference to asset sales. It is therefore equated with total or partial denationalization. Economic efficiency is not only the key to improving the performance of the public enterprise sector, but is also the source of other gains often attributed to privatization, in particular, its favorable budgetary impact. To public enterprises that are subject to national or international competition, privatization offers the possibility of increased productive efficiency as government financial backing is withdrawn and bankruptcy and takeover become possibilities. The admissibility and desirability of privatization, as well as what types of enterprise should be privatized, ought to be determined by similar considerations in both industrial and developing countries.