Malaysia's affirmative action, introduced as the New Economic Policy (NEP) 1 in 1971 to redress Malay economic setbacks, failed in its objective to acquire 30 percent equity of Malaysian public companies for Malays by 1990. This failure was translated into the government's failure to develop a sufficient number of Malay entrepreneurs with the skills to meet this target. The government had devised affirmative action under the NEP in the belief that it was a recipe for entrepreneurial development. This paper argues that affirmative action for the development of entrepreneurs is likely to fail as it contradicts the principles of entrepreneurship. This paper offers a proposition that affirmative action, far from uplifting Malay entrepreneurialism, had intuitively benefitted non-beneficiaries as they were driven to greater resolve.

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