Thursday, September 18, 2008

Malaysian household monthly income distribution

The pie chart below indicates the Malaysian household monthly income distribution. The information is sourced from MP Amirsham’s reply to Dr Michael J Devaraj's question during a parliament assembly in July 2008 recently.



The root source and period of the statistics is not provided, and the number of households surveyed is also not available. It is believed that this information should be not before 2004 and not later than 2007.

Which group do you stand in the pie?

If the same piece of information is represented by bars, it will now look like this:




And according to another survey done by the Statistic Department for the Economic Planning Unit recently, the Malaysian average monthly household income is RM3686, which falls in the RM3-4k group.

57.8% of the families are below this group, and 29.3% are above it. This shows that the families fall on the average is actually have a higher position than the median in the distribution, as the median falls in the RM2-3k group.

This mean majority of the households are at the poorer side of the income group, forming a triangular distribution graph (if you break up the RM5-10k bar into intervals of RM1k as in other bars, you should see the triangle clearly), but the income of the richer side is so much that it is still able to pull up the average income figure.

Now, can you sense the "M"?


5 comments:

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

Do u hv any info on Malaysian Household (Jumlah bil ahli dlm keluarga), plz i need those info

TQ

Voyager8 said... Reply To This Comment

Hi,

To get your information, you can contact with:

Mrs. Zarinah Mahari,
Demography Statistics Division,
Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM),
Level 4, Block C6, Parcel C,
Federal Government Administrative Centre,
Putrajaya, Malaysia 62514
Phone: 603-88889230
Fax: 603-88889231

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

hi there,
do you know how i can get the cut off points for low socioeconomic status for the Indian ethnicity..need it for my thesis...
thanks a bunch...

xenobiologista said... Reply To This Comment

Great, thanks for the info. I wanted to fact-check cos my dad forwarded me an email claiming the average household income is RM3k and knowing how many poor people are in our country, I was fairly sure that's a distorted average due to a few million-and-billionaires.

May I suggest that your bar graph is a bit off though because the RM5-10 bin is not the same size as the previous ones. It doesn't really give a good idea whether or not there's a spike in middle management incomes before we hit the Datuks-Datins.

Ria said... Reply To This Comment

great info!keep them coming :)

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