Managing Natural Wealth

Book excerpt: The remarkably rich natural environment of Malaysia attracts the interest of both industry and the environmental community. Managing Natural Wealth analyzes major natural resource and environmental policy issues in the country during the 1970s and 1980s-a period of profound socioeconomic change, rapid depletion of natural resources, and the emergence of serious problems with pollution. Managing Natural Wealth is an important up-date to Environment and Development in a Resource-Rich Economy: Malaysia under the New Economic Policy. First published in hardcover in 1997, this pathbreaking book emphasized economics as a source for analyzing the issues involved in environmental and natural resource management in developing countries. The access that Jeffrey Vincent and Rozali Mohamed Ali and the contributing authors had to unpublished data and key decisionmakers made their account an essential reference for policymakers and researchers in Malaysia and throughout the globe. Managing Natural Wealth includes a review of key developments since the 1990s by S. Robert Aiken and Colin H. Leigh, two geographers with a long-standing interest in environmental change in Malaysia and an understanding of the institutional context of its environmental policy that is unmatched in the scholarly community.