Malaysia 2018: A Synthetic Control Study
Year
2025
Tech
Synthetic Control · R · LaTeX
Links
Coming soon
What did Malaysia's first change of government since 1957 do to its economy?
20
years of pre-2018 fit
5
donor countries
-$1,000
GDP per capita gap by 2021
The question
In 2018 Barisan Nasional lost power for the first time in 61 years. You can't rerun history without the election, so we built a version of Malaysia where it never happened.
What we did
We built a 'Synthetic Malaysia' from a weighted mix of Belarus, Cambodia, Serbia, Ireland and Guatemala, picked from a donor pool filtered down from 197 countries. It was matched on GDP per capita, investment, FDI and net exports from 1998 to 2017. We tested it with an in-time placebo (a fake 2008 election) and leave-one-out checks.
What we found
Real and synthetic Malaysia tracked each other closely for 20 years, then split. By 2021, GDP per capita was around $700–1,000 below the counterfactual. COVID likely widens the gap after 2020, so the later years should be read with caution.
Next project
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