Policy Brief No.10

In Pursuit of Resiliency: Societal Well-being, Not Just Growth

The Department of Statistics (DOSM) updated its 2019 Household Income Survey to account for what happened in 2020 via its Household Income Estimates and Incidence of Poverty Report. Median household income fell by more than 11% in 2020, a year the economy contracted by 5.6%. Some 20% of households – about 550,000 households – who earned more than RM4,850 a month in 2019 fell below that threshold in 2020. Further, the number of poor households rose by more than 50%, from 405,400 households in 2019 to 639,800 households in 2020. Incidence of absolute poverty therefore increased from 5.5% to 8.4% in one year.