Economic structure of regions and development disparity in Peninsular Malaysia

This research examines the relationships between the economic structure and the levels of development in the districts of Peninsular Malaysia. It will also articulate a regionalization by grouping districts according to similarity in levels of development. The relationships between the economic structure and development will be determined by comparing economic activities and other related economic measures, such as areal linkages and population distribution, against the changing regional configurations. The configurations of the regions result from the increasing similarity in the levels of development. As the regional configurations change, the structure of economic activities and other characteristics of the districts that tend to group together can be understood.;It is argued that disparity in levels of development is inevitable and efforts to achieve even development could be misconstrued. Indicators that are used in measuring regional development disparity have important implications. Often in regionalization procedures, factors related to economic activities and other factors that can be said to be the outcome of a development process are mixed together. The regionalization procedure employed here separates these factors. Theoretically, economic activities and regional development are correlated either positively or negatively. Therefore, mixing the factors in the regionalization would not separate the different possible effects, thus missing some explanations of development processes.;The research is divided into three tasks. The first is to identify the distribution and the composition of economic activities and to analyze linkages among the districts. The methods used include location quotients, coefficients of localization, coefficient of spatial variation, and doubly constrained entropy-maximizing model. The second is to group the districts into regions based on some indicators of development level using the concept of fuzzy set logic. Finally, the findings in these two steps are examined to understand the characteristics of economic activities that distinguish the regions from each other. This is done by analyzing the variation of economic activities in the regions using the inverse spatial entropy. Discussions of the theoretical implications of the results conclude the research.