Productivity growth is essential to providing sustainable increases in living standards. Malaysia has reached a development stage where growth needs to be driven more by productivity gains than the sheer accumulation of capital and labour inputs. The 11th Malaysia Plan (2016-20) sets an ambitious labour productivity growth target of 3.7% per year, well above than the 2% average growth recorded from 2011 to 2015. Co-ordinated structural reforms will be necessary to achieve the productivity improvements needed to attain high-income country status. Areas where reforms would deliver the greatest boost to productivity include increasing the quality of education and skills training, spurring innovation, adopting information technology more widely, fostering a well-functioning competition policy framework, improving the functioning of the labour market and the regulatory framework for small and medium-sized enterprises, fostering regional integration and raising public sector productivity.

Malaysia has followed a comparatively equitable development path, largely eliminating absolute poverty and greatly reduced ethnic inequality. Income and wealth inequality have gradually declined since the mid-1970s. With the people economy at the centre of Malaysia’s ambition to become a high-income country by 2020, the focus is shifting to the challenges of relative poverty and achieving sustainable improvements in individual and societal well-being through inclusive growth. This shift would be aided by reforms in several policy areas where Malaysia may compare favourably within its region but less so relative to OECD countries. This includes reforms to increase access to quality education, provide comprehensive social protection, raise the labour force participation of women and older persons, maintain universal access to quality public healthcare, improve pension system sustainability and adequacy and move towards a tax and transfer system that does more for inclusiveness.