Malaysia's Human Resource Strategies for a Knowledge-Based Economy - Comparing the Influence of Different Labur Market Relations.

In the last 15-20 years the Malaysian government has sought to meet the increasing international competition in the labour intensive manufacturing industry by transforming the economy to a more knowledge-based economy. Important levers are industrial upgrading policies and partnerships with leading multinational and national companies. In this article we raise questions about the government’s and private companies’ capability to give enough institutional support to this transformation process. We focus on the problem of providing skilled labour by analysing the production of graduates in secondary and
tertiary educations and especially labour market related courses, and ask to what extent do institutions promote the upgrading efforts? In order to frame and contrast the Malaysian transformation efforts we make a comparison with Denmark, which also is in a transformation process to a more knowledge-based economy but began this process at an earlier stage than Malaysia. The countries have different traditions regarding participation and relations between the labour market and the government influencing supporting institutions. Our aim is to analyse some of the difficulties for a newly industrialising country to build up a new “soft” infrastructure (educational and human resource development institutions) to a more knowledge-based economy.