Local institutions and rural development in Malaysia. 1974

The scope of the paper has been confined to the basic question of whether or not local structures of governance play an instrumental role in raising agricultural productivity, increasing incomes and expanding welfare. To address this issue, the study focuses on the politico-administrative structures of district, parish and village governance and the economic institution called the Farmers" Association in the state of Selangor. Although there are ecological and institutional variations from area to area the analysis of local governance and rural development in Selangor is generalizable to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia. Nevertheless, there is an important shortcoming in the microlevel mode of analysis adopted in this study; it represents a less than total picture of the dramatic progress of rural development in Malaysia. That success story, however, has been well documented elsewhere.