46Baharuddin assessed the Second Malaysia Plan (SMP) 1971-1975 (the first Five Year Development Plan
under the NEP), and pointed to some similarities of objectives, strategies and implementation with major
assumptions and important concepts in diffusionist theory. He concluded that the socialisation of rural
populations to a modern woridview such as an economic and production culture based on modern technology,
urbanism, industrialisation and secularism might be revitalising laissez-faire and capitalist economic systems. In
respect of corrective measures to redistribute economic wealth, he demonstrated how appropriation and
expropriation processes benefited the land-owning and property owning members of society who constituted the
minority. He attributed this outcome to laissez-faire economic systems which still remained the backbone of
national policy.