Lelo Nxumalo

Below is a visualization of the migration patterns across the Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN). [ASEAN is a grouping of 10 countries including Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam]. The objective of the investigation is to illustrate the extent to which economic integration could be challenging given the different economic weights of its members . ASEAN members range from the poorest Cambodia with current per capita GDP of $1,090 to wealthy Singapore at over $56,000 as of 2014. One of the core pillars of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), inked in KL in December 2015, is mobility of skilled labor across the region. The interactive figure below illustrates migration patterns as of 2013 (using data from the UN Population Division ). The biggest sender countries, as of 2013 were Indonesia and Malaysia, which had over 1.4 million and over 800 thousand of its citizens living in other ASEAN countries, respectively....

Malaysia at a Crossroads: Diagnosing Constraints to High-Income Status In 2008, Malaysia was recognized by the Growth Commission – a distinguished panel comprising 2 Nobel Prize Winning Economists and other leading development practitioners – as one of thirteen countries that sustained high growth in the post-war period. The 30-year stretch that caught the attention of the Growth Commission was between 1967 and 1997 when Malaysia grew at an average of 7.3% per year. This long stretch of growth was interrupted by periods of external shocks including the Volcker shock of 1986, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997/8, later the so-called Dot Com Bubble of 2001, and more recently the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Despite these shocks, Malaysia remained resilient - formally earning the title "Upper Middle Income Country" in 1992. (See summary figure that breaks down the country's per capita growth story). As...

The R-generated motion chart below is a representation of East Asian economies as of 2013. The data used are from the World Bank's WDI database. Bubble size represents the relative size of the country's GDP (measured in 2011 PPP dollars). The default colors show the rate of growth with red standing for the the fastest growing.

In a recent post on the World Economic Forum website (See here ), Daron Acemoglu summarizes findings from his recent work on what really causes economic downturns . His focus is on the US economy and starts by showing that the distribution of post war growth in America has generally not followed the normal distribution. I was curious what this would look like for Malaysia (where I am currently working) so I ran the Normal Q-Q Plot in R and this is what I found. Data from the World Bank's WDI database Malaysian real per capita income growth between 1960 and 2013 has largely followed a normal distribution but there are significant tail risks. The plot above shows that large negative downturns are more common than the standard normal distribution would suggest. The downturns correspond,  in descending order of severity, to 1998 (Asian Financial Crisis), 1985 (Commodity Shock), 2009 (Great Recession), 1986 (Commodity Shock continued), 2001 (Dot Com Bust), and 1975 (...

I am presently working on a growth diagnostic project for the Malaysian economy. As with any diagnostic, an appreciation of the growth history of the country under study is necessary for one to say anything meaningful about growth prospects. (The outcome of the diagnosis will be published later this year). During the course of my research, I have discovered interesting parallels in the origins of Malaysia and Zimbabwe's redistribution policies after independence. Several years after independence from Britain (Malaysia in 1957 and Zimbabwe in 1980) both countries went through violent racial strife brought about by unresolved issues from their decolonization processes. Malaysia had gotten independence from the British but the Malay majority still had poor economic prospects compared to their Chinese counterparts and, to a lesser extent, their Indian compatriots. This is not to say there were no Malays among Malaysia's elite at the time. After all, the constitution had assure...