PETALING JAYA: Poverty rates in the country have worsened due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and improvements in absolute poverty reductions in 2019 have reversed, says the Khazanah Research Institute.
Its Households and the Pandemic 2019-2022: The State of Households 2024 (SoH 2024) report released Thursday (Sept 26) said that in 2022, the number of households in Malaysia in absolute poverty rose to 6.2%.
“This increase was driven by absolute poverty in urban households, rising to 4.5% in 2022 compared to 3.8% in 2019.
“Comparatively, rural households experienced a slight decrease in absolute poverty in that same period,” it said.
It added that the districts in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, as well as several districts neighbouring Selangor, had significantly lower incidences of poverty than the national average.
“The range of the proportion of households in absolute poverty among the districts in Peninsular Malaysia is also very wide, with the lowest being Sepang at 0.0% whilst the highest is Kecil Lojing at 43.8%,” it added.
In total, 107 districts had an incidence of poor households that was higher than the national average.
“Among them, 62 districts had a prevalence of poor households that was twice the national average (highly above), while 17 districts were significantly above the national average of poor households.
The report added that the prevalence of poor households in the vast majority of Sabah districts was significantly above or highly above the national average.
“For Sarawak, while most of its districts showed a higher proportion of households in absolute poverty, there is a notable exception in Bintulu and its neighbouring districts — which showed a lower incidence of poverty.
“This may be driven by the oil and gas activities in Bintulu, which in turn provide higher income employment opportunities.
For the Peninsular, it said that the districts along the west coast showed lower incidences of absolute poverty.
“On the other hand, districts in the central and east coast region had absolute poverty rates higher than the national average,” it said.
