The APPGM SDG Working Group Report provides insights by civil society organisations on the country’s progress towards achieving the ‘Good Health and Wellbeing’ goal as part of the effort to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is a voluntary review, outlining the current progress in Malaysia towards reaching different aspects of healthcare goals and includes recommendations for improvement.

The Sustainability Shift: Refashioning Malaysia’s Future discusses the specific ecological threats facing Malaysia and the intellectual as well as practical ‘shift’ required for a more sustainable future. The book explores themes of environmental degradation, climate change and imminent ecological collapse faced by humanity today. These issues demand an urgent response from individuals, industries and national governments. Yet, in most countries, national policies are still based on fragmentary thinking and unsound science. Malaysia, a resource-rich upper-middle income economy, is no exception. It will certainly make a difference globally if Malaysia – home to an important tropical rainforest with mega-diverse species richness – can make a transition to sustainability. Malaysia faces a spectrum of institutional challenges as it grapples with this transition. Instead of looking at environmental problems through a compartmentalised perspective, it is essential to understand the common root causes of an overarching unsustainability. This book shows how, by reforming its institutional hardware, software and ‘heartware’, Malaysia can nurture an inclusive, sustainable society and also benefit economically by greening its growth.

The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States marked the beginning of the study of our postindustrial information society. Austrian-born economist Fritz Machlup had focused his research on the patent system, but he came to realize that patents were simply one part of a much bigger "knowledge economy." He then expanded the scope of his work to evaluate everything from stationery and typewriters to advertising to presidential addresses--anything that involved the activity of telling anyone anything. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States then revealed the new and startling shape of the U.S. economy. Machlup's cool appraisal of the data showed that the knowledge industry accounted for nearly 29 percent of the U.S. gross national product, and that 43 percent of the civilian labor force consisted of knowledge transmitters or full-time knowledge receivers. Indeed, the proportion of the labor force involved in the knowledge economy increased from 11 to 32 percent between 1900 and 1959--a monumental shift. Beyond documenting this revolution, Machlup founded the wholly new field of information economics. The transformation to a knowledge economy has resonated throughout the rest of the century, especially with the rise of the Internet. As two recent observers noted, "Information goods--from movies and music to software code and stock quotes--have supplanted industrial goods as the key drivers of world markets." Continued study of this change and its effects is testament to Fritz Machlup's pioneering work.

The first 50 years of ASEAN integration has brought peace and prosperity to the Southeast Asian region, while the next 50 will undoubtedly be fraught with unprecedented challenges. Today ASEAN not only has to contend with its own internal challenges arising from the highly diverse political, economic and socio-cultural systems of its member countries, it also has to deal with external factors which include shifts in geostrategic balance, fraying global consensus on free trade, populism and xenophobia, climate change, digital revolutions and cybercrimes. Set against the above background, this edited collection considers some of the contemporary issues and challenges faced by ASEAN in its journey towards more cohesive and dynamic regional integration. Among the topics explored are ASEAN’s evolving partnerships with its key strategic partners including China and the United States on economic policies and strategies, educational systems and frameworks, migration and environmental threats.

Verico discusses the ASEAN economic integration from dual perspectives of time span (trade, investment and finance) and framework (bilateral, sub-regional, regional and regional plus). The work is a comprehensive study of the integration in the wake of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC)’s inauguration in late 2015. Examining various economic agreement levels from the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), Bilateral Free Trade Agreement (BFTA) and the AEC to financial integration in ASEAN, Verico attempts to envisage the future of ASEAN in completing its regional economic integration from trade to investment and finance. Verico argues that, in the absence of a customs union, ASEAN must utilize the open-regionalism frameworks of the ASEAN Plus One, ASEAN Plus Three, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and others in order to shift its economic integration level in this way.