Does the “Phillips Curve” Really Exist? New Empirical Evidence from Malaysia

The hypothesized trade-off relationship between inflation rate and unemployment rate has been known as the “Phillips curve”. Though the Phillips curve has played an important role in the decision-making process on macroeconomic policy, there have been critics who doubted the existence of the “Phillips curve”. Despite a number of studies on the Phillips curve, there has been a lack of research that probed the hypothesis in the developing countries' context. This paper chooses Malaysia as a case study to empirically examine the relationship between inflation rate and unemployment rate. The most interesting finding of this paper is the existence of a long-run and trade-off relationship – and also causal relationship between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate in Malaysia. In other word, this paper has provided an empirical evidence to support the existence of the Phillips curve in the case of Malaysia.