Tag: income distribution

The Department of Statistics has just released the 2014 Household Income Survey. I feel the survey is more comprehensive than the last one, although there are still a few improvements I would like to see made.

Anyway, with the release, I thought I should update an old chart I drew some time back.

Here is the latest household income distribution according to income brackets. One household comprises of 4.3 persons.

I will not go deep into it at the moment but I am bit curious at the strength of income growth since 2012. Specifically, I am thinking of the pace at which share of the lower brackets has come down since the last survey.

I am less puzzled by the 2009 level because a recession happened that year. Growth tends to be stronger post recession, versus other times, under normal circumstances/recovery.

I am thinking of correcting the charts for inflation later. Maybe that would make the three-survey comparison better and make the distribution less surprising.

Yes, I know that the media has reported earlier that the median has grown to RM4,858 in 2014 from RM3,262 in 2012. But it was only after I saw the graphical representation that I realized how strong the growth was, which in turn, made me skeptical.

If you are interested in the full spectrum of the 2014 household income distribution, here it is:

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):