State capacity is widely seen as an essential institutional underpinning of sucessful late development of East Asian newly industrialised countries (NICs) and as a defining element of the so-called developmental state. This article addresse issues of state capacity in the case of Malaysia. However, in fathoming the nature of administrative capacity in Malaysia, it does not focus on the socio-economic planning machinery, which often stands in the limelight of such analysis. Rather, it highlights the evolving instituional arrangements related to human resource management, quality assurance, and performance monitoring in the civil service are discussed in greater detail. It is conlude that the Malayisian government has generally been well aware of the necessity to continuously improve the adminstrative capacity of the civil service so that it can assist national development effectively. Enventualy, complentary state agencies that perform self-reflexive or introspetive functions have been put in place. However, given the nature of the souces their research would be needed to analyse more systematically the extent to which the discourse of civil service excellence and reform actually translates into superior public administration outcomes beneficial to late development. Futhermore, the likely shortcomings and biases of government-sponsored adminstrative monitoring and reform may only be overcome if the system is subjected to effetive public accountability