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Liberalisation challenges, such as those that arise with the establishment of the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) and elimination of trade barriers, have led to competition among local and foreign manufacturers, requiring Malaysian manufacturing companies to achieve high productivity to address the emergence of new operations by increasing their industrial efficiency and performance. This article aims to measure the level of technical efficiency and analyse the factors that contribute to technical inefficiency in the Malaysian manufacturing industry in 2015. This study uses data from 8,653 firms based on the latest census (2015) obtained from the Statistics Department using the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). Based on the results, the companies' overall technical efficiency level was high at 0.812. For the determinants of technical efficiency, it was found that ratio of medium to high level of education, company size, information and communication technology spending, training expenses and wage rates showed a positive relationship with technical inefficiencies. The manufacturing industry needs to focus on investing in human capital and scale economic achievement, and high technology production that will increase the technical efficiency level of companies and employees.

The purpose of this study is to measure the level of technical efficiency (TE) and to analyse the factors of technical inefficiency of electrical and electronic manufacturing industry in Malaysia in 2015. The determinants studied include capital-labour ratio, education level ratio, firm size, information technology, and communication expenses, training expenditure, wage rates, and research and development expenditure. This study uses data on 531 firms based on the latest census of 2015 obtained from the Department of Statistics, Malaysia using the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) approach. Based on the results, the firm's overall TE level is high at 0.836. For the determinants of TE, it was found that firm size can reduce the inefficiencies of firm, while capital-labour ratios shows a positive relationship with technical inefficiencies in firms. The policy implication is that the electrical and electronic manufacturing industry needs to focus on scale economic achievement and high technology production in line with the competency level of employee and create more international industry technical cooperation.

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Exports play an essential role in the world economy. Therefore, it is important to identify the determinants of exports and it is important for policymakers as increased productivity and international trade are important for each country. This paper examines the determinants of exports in Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. This study is intended to estimate the impact of import, exchange rate, FDI, inflation and Crude oil on export. Three different econometric techniques such as Levin, Lin and Chu test; also, it has been used three different models for panel data estimation namely Pooled OLS, Random Effect and Fixed Effect. Apart from these techniques, different diagnostic tests have also been applied on the secondary data ranging from 1981-2016 which collected from World Bank. The results of the study show that import and exchange rate are positively and significantly related with export in Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand whereas FDI has a significantly negative effect. To sum up, the study concluded that in order to stimulate exports, governments or policymakers should provide peace and political stability between the four countries and the surrounding region in order to obtain more investors.