Malaysia's commodity export performance during Asian currency crisis and US subprime mortgage crisis

This paper highlights the impact of the 1997-1998 Asian currency crisis and the 2008-2009 US global financial crisis on Malaysia's exports. By using a quantitative approach, the findings pinpoint the types of Malaysia's exports that were severely hit during these crises. The results of this study show that the Asian financial crisis did not affect Malaysia's exports as badly as the global economic recession did. The novelty of this paper lies in using detailed information on Malaysia's commodity exports based on SITC (Revisions 3 and 4) during the two crises. The practical utility of this study is that it offers policymakers an insight into the vulnerable types of exports during crises so that they would be able to make good strategic decisions to protect the performance of export sectors in the event of future crises.