Competition for Car Manufacturers in Malaysia Setting with Respect to WTO Liberalization Policy

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first like to express my gratitude for my research supervisor, colleagues, and peers and family whose immense and constant support has been a source of continuous guidance and inspiration.

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I [type your full first names & surname here], declare that the following dissertation/thesis and its entire content has been an individual, unaided effort and has not been submitted or published before. Furthermore, it reflects my opinion and take on the topic and is does not represent the opinion of the University.

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ABSTRACT

With the emergence of trade liberalization policy, under the World Trade Organization, (WTO) has transformed the global business, thereby facilitating open market access to both developed and developing countries. However, the so-called economic liberalization framework is meant to safeguard the interests of the developed nations, while the developing and least-developed countries have experienced numerous challenges during the past decade. Malaysia is the only country to adopt a national industrialization policy to counter the negative effects of WTO regime, in order to protect the local manufacturing industries, most notably, the automotive industry. Malaysia has also experienced stiff challenges in the wake of new liberalized trade policy framework. Although the country has made unprecedented economic progress in the past five decades, but the automotive sector is still in its developing phase. In order to compete in the global automotive market, the Malaysian government has implemented a new automotive policy framework, but that has failed to produce any results, as the monopoly of two national automakers and foreign automotive giants, such as Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi, and others still continues. On the other hand, lack of technological support, infrastructure development, and inadequate training facilities, a large number of unskilled workers, are some of the major factors that have contributed to sluggish development trends within the Malaysian automobile manufacturing industry. This dissertation provides a comprehensive account of historical development of automotive industry in Malaysia, the policies and current trends, and also discusses the impact of implementation of WTO liberalized trade policy framework. The first chapter gives an over view of the current trend of the automotive industry especially in Malaysia and how has the liberalization policy can impact on any of the industry. The thesis objective and rationale has been defined to provide the pattern of the thesis. The second chapter intends to investigate if market liberalization results in supporting a few giant companies to monopolize the global automotive industry. This dissertation highlights different aspects, factors, while taking into account different policy frameworks, which primarily include assessing the pre and post globalization era of developing economies like Malaysia. This study also highlights the current automobile market trends, future forecast, and barriers in Malaysian automotive industrial policies. The third chapter of the dissertation aims to carry out the research that is based on secondary information available from various data bases. However for an in-depth study, the thesis takes into account the historical performance, current policies and forecasts of the Malaysian Automotive ...