I just felt a need to update my old post on household income distribution I put up back in 2012.
Here are the distributions (the categories are based on households’ monthly income. A household is roughly defined as a family of four, with two working adults):
You could see some improvement from 2009 to 2012, but it is really hard to see from here whether that improvement was due to secular factors, or just that the base was bad (due to cyclical factors). I suspect it was largely cyclical. The year 2009 after all was a recession year. I detest measuring almost anything starting from 2009 for almost every purpose.
I could compare both years to an older dataset to determine if there had been substantial improvement. I think I will do it later. And probably, control for inflation too.
I obtained all data from the Department of Statistics’ Household Income Survey, 2009 and 2012.
I had to do some data manipulation here because the 2012 data has fewer income categories than the last one. This affected income categories from RM5,000 to RM10,000 the most. I had to average out the older categories and fit it into the new ones as used in the 2012 survey so that I could make an easy comparison.
I have to add, I am quite disappointed that the Statistics Department abolished the old categories and even lumped some categories together, like the categories for those making above RM10,000 per month. It makes the distribution a bit unnatural.
More importantly, there is a loss of information, although I am sure the Department of Statistics has it. It is just that they are just not sharing it publicly. You can see the relative richness of the 2009 survey below compared to the 2012 edition (the red bar below is the 2009 median):
