2018 Urban Research Award: The Effects of Ethnically Segregated Urban Neighborhoods

The Effects of Ethnically Segregated Urban Neighborhoods: Evidence from Malaysia’s New Villages

Economics Ph.D. candidate Jia De Gedeon Lim will conduct a study of the impact of the “New Village Program” in British Malaya on the current urban prosperity and interethnic preferences of urban dwellers in Malaysia. Specifically, he will examine the effects of long-run ethnic segregation from The New Village Program, which was an effort to cut off supplied and support for growing communist factions by the British Malaysia government: 650,000 ethnic Chinese “squatters” (nearly 1/4 of the ethnic Chinese population of 1947 British Malaya) were forcibly resettled into 540 mono-ethnic urban villages (which have evolved into mono-ethnic urban neighborhoods in present-day towns and cities in Malaysia). Lim seeks to quantify the effects of this segregation from 1949 to 1956 on urban prosperity—defined via inter-ethnic occupational and income inequality—and national identity/ethnic integration today.

Lim will use a combination of existing data from the Malaysian Census primary survey data to measure the differences in various socio-demographic and inter-ethnic outcomes between individuals who lived in historical New Village neighborhoods and those who did not through a series of surveys in the six states of Malaysia with the highest concentration of historical New Villages. He will then use statistical analysis to determine the quantifiable impact of the New Village Program.

Lim hopes his research will inform the dialogue surrounding new immigrant integration refugee resettlement in cities in Europe and the United States and provide evidence for greater ethnic integration programs in communities around the world.

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