KUALA LUMPUR (Nikkei Markets) -- Malaysia, raring to break into the club of high-income nations, needs to unleash few structural reforms to lift local wages and shrink income inequality in an economy that has enjoyed near-full employment for years, policymakers and economists said.
For nearly two decades, Malaysia's unemployment rate has hovered around 3%, a reading economists consider as full employment. Compensation to employees, however, has stagnated at around 35% of gross domestic product, lagging that of regional rivals such as Singapore.
