The Persistence of Poverty: Rural Development Policy in Malaysia

Abstract

The persistence of rural poverty is related to the reliance on the indirect "trickling down" process to distribute the benefits of public investments. The advantaged not only obtain their share of benefits first, they also take the largest share. Thus the incomes of the richer members of the community rise faster than those of the poor, and relative poverty increases. Even within the NEP, dependence on the trickle down strategy continues. Planners tend to assume that policies favouring the Malays equally contribute to poverty eradication. However, as the NEP succeeds in advancing the Malay community, ethnicity alone becomes an increasingly less reliable criterion of disadvantaged status.