A/HRC/44/40/Add.1 16. Overall, Malaysia has made immense progress on poverty alleviation, but the job remains incomplete. Under the flawed official poverty line, its national poverty rate fell from 49 per cent in 1970 to 0.4 per cent in 2016, 21 but its accomplishments remain impressive even under more realistic measures. 22 As of 2016, 95.5 per cent of households had access to piped water and 99.9 per cent had access to electricity.23 Average household income grew by 7.3 per cent annually from 1970 to 2012, with the bottom 40 per cent of income earners enjoying the highest growth. 24 It remains all the more significant that despite such accomplishments, a considerable proportion of the country still lives in poverty. 17. The Government has a real opportunity to become a true champion of poverty reduction by improving the lives of many facing hardship and realizing the poverty eradication ambitions of the new economic policy. The Special Rapporteur met with many politicians and government officials who were clearly dedicated to improving the wellbeing of the poorest people and marginalized groups. The Government should capitalize on this goodwill by correcting the narrative around poverty, providing those living in poverty with the support they need and ensuring that the country’s economic growth is truly inclusive and benefits the entire population. II. Poverty measurement 18. A national poverty measure should enable a sober, contextualized assessment of the level and nature of poverty, but in Malaysia it has become a way for successive Governments to declare victory over poverty without having actually achieved it. The national poverty line bears no relationship to the cost of living, household incomes, or realities on the ground. It was meaningful in 1970 but real household income has increased fivefold since then and Malaysia has gone from being a low-income to an upper-middleincome country in that time.25 Apart from being inconsistent with almost all independent analysis, the artificially low measure has discouraged research on poverty and distorted the targeting of existing social support programmes. 19. The result is that “Malaysians feel a sense of disconnect with official poverty statistics. They feel that their incomes are barely enough to make ends meet and yet, by official count, we have almost no poverty in the country.” 26 In 2018, nearly 30 per cent of Malaysians felt that they did not have enough money for food (double the number in 2012) and 23 per cent reported having inadequate money for shelter. 27 Roughly half of all households did not have sufficient savings to cope with an unforeseen financial shock in 201928 and as of 2013, 53 per cent of Malaysian households had no financial assets.29 20. The illusion of poverty eradication has been reinforced through the deliberate exclusion of vast numbers of people from statistics and analysis in Malaysia. Official statistics only capture the situation of those with Malaysian citizenship, leaving out millions of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, and stateless people, all of whom are disproportionately affected by poverty. 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Economic Planning Unit, Prime Minister’s Department, Eleventh Malaysia Plan 2016–2020: Anchoring Growth on People (May 2015), p. 21. For example, an alternative measure proposed by Martin Ravallion, which is tied to mean income, shows a decline from just over 40 per cent to about 20 per cent between the early 1980s and 2015: Martin Ravallion, “Is the govt hiding millions of Malaysia’s poor?” Department of Statistics, Household Income and Basic Amenities Survey Report 2016, p. 36. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Malaysia Human Development Report 2013: Redesigning an Inclusive Future (2014), p. 34. Martin Ravallion, “Has Malaysia virtually eliminated poverty?” Economics and Poverty, 21 January 2019. Khazanah Research Institute, “The absolute vs relative poverty conundrum,” p. 3. World Bank, Malaysia Economic Monitor, December 2019: Making Ends Meet, p. 63. Ibid., p. 81. UNDP, Malaysia Human Development Report 2013: Redesigning an Inclusive Future, p. 49. 5