Abdul Hamid Jaafar

Climate Change Mitigation and Policy Concern for Prioritization

Purpose – Climate change impacts and scientific evidence are now irresistible based on time scales, consequences and perspectives. Civil society leaders and business people are now agreed on emission reduction targets to mitigate the effects of climate change but the question remains: how to make sure that durable, lasting, and real mitigation options are taking place? The purpose of this paper is to ask, does climate change mitigation option (via carbon tax) exert a greater improvement within the tradeoff between climate change and economic values?Design/methodology/approach – This study tries to lessen the gap between mitigation options and economic development activities using computable general equilibrium techniques focusing on alteration of carbon tax instruments.Findings – The findings indicate that much strong carbon tax policy compensates GDP compositions, places economic burden, shrinks enterprise savings and investment.Originality/value – This paper describes the most favorable policy option an...

Energy Use and Environmental Impact of New Alternative Fuel Mix in Electricity Generation in Malaysia

Production of electricity by burning coal, oil, and natural gas produces CO2, SO2, NOx, etc. which act as green- house gases and pollutants. This paper examines fuel use, energy production, and the quantities of these gases produced in the Malaysian economy during the years 1991 and 2000. Input-output (Leontief) analysis is used in this study to enable calculation of energy demand and pollution effects throughout the economy. This study also estimates changes in emis- sions related to changes in fuel mix projected in Vision 2020. It is found that the fuel mix envisioned by the Fuel Diversi- fication Strategy, designed to reduce Malaysias dependence on fuel oil and increase its energy security would increase undesired emissions. This study may find use in formulation of energy policy in Malaysia.

Agricultural Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climatic Changes In Malaysia: Review on Paddy Sector

Climate change has mixed impacts on agriculture and the impacts are different in terms of areas, periods and crops. The changing factors of climate have been exerting strong negative impacts on Malaysian agriculture, which is apprehended to result in shortages of water and other resources for long term, worsening soil condition, disease and pest outbreaks on crops and livestock, sea-level rise, and so on. Due to climate change, agricultural productivity and profitability is declining. Despite continuous increases of government subsidy, area of paddy plantation is decreasing and the adaption practices are ineffective. As climate change is universal and its existence is indefinite, the farmers need to adapt to and find ways to mitigate the damages of climatic variation in order to sustain agricultural productivity and attain food security for them.

Globalization, Environment and Policy: Malaysia Toward a Developed Nation

This paper analyzes the scenario pollution implication of globalization process such as trade liberalization in the Malaysian economy toward a developed nation by 2020. In the first part, the purpose of this paper is to provide various air emissions in the Malaysian economy for the year 2020. The quantitative assessment reveals that the selected emissions are quite high in 2020 compared to 2000. More compactly, the scenario analysis points out that in 2020 CO2 emission of industry & manufacturing sector will increase 112.6%, as well as 207.23% in the electricity sector, which indicate an alarming rate to unseating for sustainable economy and for Kyoto target. And, in the second part, we reviewed priority policy issues identifying incentives to environmental sustainability and Malaysian thinking of 2020 for sustainability. However, the government of Malaysia has begun applying a preventive approach rather than the curative effort undertaken previously for sustainable development. Our suggestion is that to achieve sustainability emphasis must be given utilization of clean technology so that negative impact on the environment could be reduced.

Climate change issues and Malaysian initiatives

The purpose of this paper is to describe Malaysian climate change experiences, to highlight the lack of Malaysian initiatives in drafting a national policy on climate change, the structures, activities and national agenda of climate change issues. A description of possible climate change impacts on Malaysia, some facts and figures together with activities, structures and the national agenda are provided in this study. This study emphasises that sustainable long-term economic policy requires a workable framework for climate change and vulnerabilities that have not yet been covered in the national economy. Malaysia must visualise appropriate futures and frameworks on climate change issues, potential changes and national initiatives for planning strategies to reduce vulnerabilities. This study draws attention to the fact that Malaysia ranked 52 out of 57 in the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) in 2009. Malaysian climate protection performance still lags behind other countries in the region. This study evaluates and discusses current information about on-going policy preparations on climate change issues, and provides a critical review to improve Malaysian climate change-related initiatives.

Climatic changes and household food availability in Malaysian east coast economic region

Sustainable food security at household level is one of the emerging issues for all nations. There are several factors such as social, economic, political, demographic, natural, and livelihood strategies that causes to the vulnerability of the status of household food security. Therefore examining the vulnerability of these factors is essential to identify the reason and recognize the most vulnerable communities. This study is an attempt to study on the vulnerability of the factors of household food availability and its linkage with climatic changes in Malaysia. The study is based on primary data collected in the months of July – October, 2012 through a questionnaire survey on 460 low income households from East Coast Economic Region (ECER) in Malaysia. The samples were selected from E-Kasih poor household database, based on cluster random sampling technique. The study found that the vulnerability of the factors of household food availability has decreased statistically significantly over the last five years period in Malaysia for the factors of effectiveness of food distribution process, road and transportation facility for food distribution process, availability of expected food in the local market, sufficiency of expected food in the local market, and stability of food supply in market. The mean values of the current status of the factors of household food availability differ significantly at 1% significance level from the scenario of 5 years ago. However, most of the cases climatic issues were found less responsible for the changes of these factors. Though Malaysia is adversely affected by climatic change, the factors of food availability are not affected yet remarkably. This study suggests that the food security programs need to be integrated with climatic change adaptation programs to ensure more effective and sustainable household food security in future, especially among the poor and low income group. Moreover, a proper monitoring agency is required to ensure consistent supply of food in the rural and remote areas, especially at the time of natural calamity or off season.

Intersectoral linkages in oil palm industry between Malaysia and Indonesia

Malaysia and Indonesia are both major producers of palm oil. The palm oil industry in both countries has contributed immensely to rural income and development. The purpose of this paper is to empirically contrast the similarities and differences in linkages between the Malaysian and Indonesian palm oil industry.The assessment is carried out using the hypothetical extraction method. Data used in this study were from Malaysian and Indonesian 2005 Input-Output Table. Empirical findings of this study revealed several similarities and differences of Malaysian and Indonesian palm oil industry. The linkage analyses in this paper indicated that for both Malaysia and Indonesia, the oil palm cultivation sector is economically more linked to the manufacturing sector than to the agriculture or service sectors. In other words, the cultivation sector not only has a strong economic pull on the manufacturing sector, but also strong economic push as well. The processing sector was found to be more backwardly linked to the agriculture sector and more forwardly linked to the manufacturing sector. Comparing the Malaysian palm oil industry to the Indonesian palm oil industry, the empirical findings indicated that the palm oil industry in Malaysia is more interconnected to the rest of the production sectors than it is in Indonesia. The overall implication of this is that the the Malaysian palm oil industry has greater influence on its economy than the industry does on the overall economy of Indonesia.

The Services Sector's Contribution as Well as Pollution Implication in the Malaysian Economy: An Input-Output Approach

This paper analyzes the contribution of services sector as well as pollution implication of services sector for the production of different industries in the Malaysian economy. In the first part, the purpose of this paper is to provide direct and indirect service intensities that reveal the contribution of services sector in the Malaysian economy. And, in the second part, the quantitative assessment of selected air emissions of services sector in the economy is revealed during the time period 1991 to 2000. The findings indicate that the contribution of services sector almost steady during the time period and direct and indirect intensities of other sectors, transport & communication, trade, financial related service, public service and entertainment sectors are quite significant; however the CO, CO2, SO2 and NOx emissions from the selected sectors are quite high in 2000 compared to 1991.

An alternative approach to identify key industries: issues to selection criteria

Within a process of modeling exercise, this study aimed to understand appropriate selection criteria to identify key industries. There are many key sector identification linkage measures in the subject matter and sensitivity issue among them can be tricky because many of these measures differ only slightly but can result in outcomes that are quite dissimilar. With this background, we proposed an alternate approach that helps to resolve this issue. The proposed approach utilizes in this study by five sub-methods and high degree of the frequency of their occurrences in sub-methods to determine the key sectors. The study approach is applied to Malaysia as the public sector investment remains a large share in the national economy, like other developing countries, and the correct identification is still a challenge for sectoral planning. The experiences from this study can be used to guide appropriate public investment in Malaysia and elsewhere with similar economic forms.

Trade and Environment: External Shocks and Vulnerability - A Computable Generable Approach to the Malaysian Economy

Malaysia is now an open and export-oriented economy. The export and manufacturing sectors are contributing significantly to economic growth and its share on GDP contributing significantly. It has increasingly diversified its exports in terms of products and markets, the result of which has been large changes in the composition of exports. As an open economy the impacts of external price shocks (i.e. a rise of import prices causes depreciates the real exchange rate) are very sensitive in the economy. Our simulation results illustrate that import price shocks by 15 percent decreases a large in domestic production of building and construction by 25.87 percent, hotels restaurants and entertainment by 12.04 percent, industry by 12.02 percent, agriculture by 11.01 percent, and electricity and gas sector by 9.55 percent. On the import side, the simulations confirm the trade theory and illustrate that imports decreases in all service sectors significantly. Among the scenarios, as a result of the import price shocks by 15 percent the largest negative impacts goes on industry sectors by 29.67 percent followed by building and construction by 22.42 percent, hotels restaurants and entertainments by 19.45 percent, electricity and gas by 13.56 percent, agriculture by 12.63 percent and other service sectors by 11.17 percent. It also causes the household income, household savings and household consumption down. In contrast the import price shocks increase real GDP, nominal GDP and government revenue, however significant negative impact goes to the investment and fixed capital investment.