The Malaysian State's conception of economic equity: a tentative study

Abstract

In the Richard T. Ely Lecture to the American Economic Association in 1975, Alice Rivlin bemoaned the lack of serious interest in the problems of economic equity on the part of her fellow economists of past generations. She cjoded them for devoting "some of their most ingenious intellectual efforts to explaining to each other why they had so little to say on about the optimum distribution of income". The evasion of most economists on this score in part can be attributed to their risk-aversed perception that it is impossible to demonstrate that any particular conception is equitable. Thus, they reason, it is best to let the political leadership and politicians hammer out the messy valueladen specification of economic justice. Once determined by the political process, they can then provide the technical design and implementation of programmes to pursue the given specification of economic equity.