Who is Keeping Score? Estimating the Number of Foreign Workers in Malaysia
Malaysia has experienced a rise in foreign labor inflows in response to steady economic expansion and demographic changes. The foreign workforce has been hovering around 15 percent of the total labor force in recent years according to Labour Force...
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| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Malaysia
2020
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/892721588859396364/Who-is-Keeping-Score-Estimating-the-Number-of-Foreign-Workers-in-Malaysia http://hdl.handle.net/10986/33730 |
| Summary: | Malaysia has experienced a rise in
foreign labor inflows in response to steady economic
expansion and demographic changes. The foreign workforce has
been hovering around 15 percent of the total labor force in
recent years according to Labour Force Surveys by the
Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM). Foreign labor is
concentrated in low-skilled occupations, and in Malaysia the
term “foreign worker” specifically implies a foreigner doing
low-skilled work. These foreign workers come from
neighboring countries, predominantly Indonesia, Bangladesh,
Nepal and the Philippines. This report is one of the first
attempts, to team’s knowledge, to estimate the number of
irregular foreign workers in Malaysia. Its contributions to
this field are the following: first, it develops a
conceptual framework that lays out potential entry points of
irregular foreign workers. Second, it identifies alternative
administrative data sources that could help estimate the
magnitude of irregular foreign workers at each entry point.
Third, it identifies methods that can be employed to measure
irregular foreign workers with the current data availability
and outlines what can be carried out further in the future
using Immigration Department’s microdata. This report
estimates the total number of foreign workers in
Malaysiaranged from 2.96 million to 3.26 million in 2017.
Among these, the number of irregular foreign workers is
estimated to be 1.23 million – 1.46 million. |
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