EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Mainland Chinese Immigrant-owned SMEs in Malaysia: Case Studies

Mengdie Ruan, Angathevar Baskaran and Shanshan Zhou

Millennial Asia, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 5-34

Abstract: This article explores the contributions of—and constraints faced by—small and medium enterprises (SMEs) owned by mainland Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in Malaysia using qualitative research and primary data gathered from five cases. It was found that Chinese immigrant SMEs make significant contributions to the host economy in terms of employment, diverse products and services, exports, innovation, micro foreign direct investment (FDI) and global linkages. Of these, employment creation and exports appear to be their most important contributions. They face various constraints, some of which are largely the same as those faced by local entrepreneurs. However, they additionally face some specific constraints which local entrepreneurs do not, such as language barrier, lack of financial support in the growth stage, lack of government assistance, and onerous bureaucratic problems, such as tax and visa requirements. The findings suggest that the government should create a special department to formulate tailor-made policies and incentives to support immigrant-owned SMEs, so that their contribution to the future economic development of Malaysia can be further strengthened and monitored.

Keywords: Immigrant entrepreneurship; Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs; immigrant small and medium enterprise (SME); Malaysia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0976399620977026 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:millen:v:13:y:2022:i:1:p:5-34

DOI: 10.1177/0976399620977026

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Millennial Asia
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:millen:v:13:y:2022:i:1:p:5-34