ABSTRACT
Introduction Malaysia’s economic rise was made possible due to a rich endowment of natural resources like tin, petroleum and timber together with agricultural production of rubber and palm oil (Aiken et al. 1982; Vincent and Ali 1997). These resources had alleviated poverty and increased human well-being considerably. The country has largely achieved the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) objective of eradicating poverty, which fell from 17 per cent in 1990 to 3.8 per cent in 2009, based on the national poverty line (EPU and UNCT 2010; Hezri 2013). It has also achieved gender parity at all levels of education, surpassing parity at the universal level. With this success, Malaysia currently aims to graduate from an upper-middle income to a high-income economy (Hill et al. 2012).
