ABSTRACT
The growth of the public sector since the 1930s has occurred in varied circumstances internationally. In the advanced industrial capitalist economies of Europe and, to a lesser extent, in North America, the growth of the public sector has been largely associated with the growth of the welfare state, especially under pressure from and the influence of social democratic movements and Keynesian economic ideas. Since the 1980s, privatization has been strongly recommended to most countries where key sectors have been dominated by public enterprises. In the early and mid-1980s, external price shocks led to a marked deterioration in macroeconomic performance globally, precipitating fiscal and debt crises. Colonial Malaya was prized as the economically most important colony in the British Empire for much of the first half of the twentieth century, with its export earnings (mainly from rubber and tin) in the crucial post-Second World War years exceeding those of all other British colonies and Britain itself.
