PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT IN THE UTILIZATION OF DOMESTIC AND IMPORTED INPUTS IN RESOURCE AND NON-RESOURCE-BASED INDUSTRIES: 1983-2005

The focus of the study is to examine the improvement in productivity on the utilization of intermediate input in resources and non resources-based industries of the Malaysian manufacturing sector. Since improvement in productivity can determine how well an input performed, our main interest rests on whether there exists any discrepancy between the performance of domestic and imported intermediate input. To undertake such an analysis, we employed various publications of the Malaysian Input-Output Tables. The input-output coefficients of domestic and imported inputs were then simulated by using the commodity technology model. It was anticipated that three main findings could be obtained from this study. Firstly, non resources-based industries have shown that both inputs have a higher improvement in productivity compared to resources-based industries. Secondly, this study revealed that resource-based industries have improved productivity relatively in the imported input used compared to domestic input. Thirdly, the number of industries that were efficient in utilizing imported input was higher, both, in resource and non resource-based industries. Results from this study show that imported intermediate input are still important in the production of manufactured products, even though many incentives have been given in order to increase the efficiency of the domestic input used.