scholarly journals Malaysia Household Wealth Distribution: Current Evidence and Future Prospects

Author(s):  
Muhammed Abdul Khalid

The paper studies the distribution and inequality of wealth among the household per capita in Malaysia, using the 2007 Malaysia’s Household Income Survey (HIS) data. Consistent with findings from other countries, the distribution of wealth is more skewed than that of income. The distribution of wealth shows that the top 10% of Malaysian households per capita control 35% of the country’s wealth, while the bott om 40% own 8%. The decomposition of wealth shows that the Gini coefficient for savings is 0.98, while the figure for investment assets and real estate assets are 0.90 and 0.52 respectively. It is expected that wealth inequality will widen in the future due to several factors such as liberalization of the higher education policy and pro-rich tax treatment.   Keywords: Inequality, Malaysia, wealth.

2015 ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Muhhamed Bin Abdul Khalid

This article uses data from Household Income Survey (HIS) to provide an overview of the structure and distribution of wealth in Malaysia, providing estimates of the mean and median levels of household per-capita wealth by asset classes and estimates of the degree of inequality of wealth holdings. The data confirm that wealth is unequally distributed and also that it is much more unequally distributed than income. The study also finds that a sizeable number of Malaysians do not possess any wealth and that more than half do not own any financial assets. Most of their wealth is in the form of property assets, with minimal ownership of financial assets. Quantile regression analysis indicates that wealth is significantly related to a range of factors including age, occupation, education, marital status, ethnicity, and income. It is expected that the inequality gap will remain wide, unless there are reforms in the educational system, the taxation regime, and in poverty-alleviation programs.


Divested ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Ken-Hou Lin ◽  
Megan Tobias Neely

This chapter focuses on how finance has transformed household wealth—a trend with long-term implications for how social-class inequality becomes entrenched. It first reviews the uneven distribution of wealth in the United States. Wealth inequality has risen since the last quarter of the 20th century. Today, fewer American families have sufficient means to accumulate wealth over time, and the concentration of capital in the hands of a select few has widened the fault line between the richest and the rest. The chapter also examines how the distribution of wealth has changed across generations—more precisely, what social scientists call “cohorts.” That is, wealth for the baby boomer generation differs greatly from wealth among the millennials. Since wealth accumulation develops over the course of a person’s life, families in young adulthood and near retirement are considered.


1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Satyajit Chatterjee ◽  
B. Ravikumar

We study the impact of a minimum consumption requirement on the rate of economic growth and the evolution of wealth distribution. The requirement introduces a positive dependence between the intertemporal elasticity of substitution and household wealth. This dependence implies a transition phase during which the growth rate of per-capita quantities rise toward their steady-state values and the distributions of wealth, consumption, and permanent income become more unequal. We calibrate the minimum consumption requirement to match estimates available for a sample of Indian villagers and find that these transitional effects are quantitatively significant and depend importantly on the economy's steady-state growth rate.


2014 ◽  
Vol 104 (5) ◽  
pp. 107-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher D. Carroll ◽  
Jiri Slacalek ◽  
Kiichi Tokuoka

Using a standard, realistically calibrated model of buffer-stock saving with transitory and permanent income shocks, we study how cross-country differences in the wealth distribution and household income dynamics affect the marginal propensity to consume out of transitory shocks (MPC). Across the 15 countries in our sample, we find that the aggregate consumption response ranges between 0.1 and 0.4 and is stronger (i) in economies with large wealth inequality, where a larger proportion of households has little wealth, (ii) under larger transitory income shocks, and (iii) when we consider households only use liquid assets (rather than net wealth) to smooth consumption.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Nolan ◽  
Juan Palomino ◽  
Philippe Van Kerm ◽  
Salvatore Morelli

This paper uses household wealth surveys to compare patterns of intergenerational wealth transfers across six rich countries and assess the relationships between transfers, current levels of net wealth, and wealth inequality. The paper examines four Euro Area countries, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain and extends the systematic comparison to the US and the UK. It finds that many of those currently at the top of the wealth distribution did not benefit from intergenerational transfers, but those who did received particularly large amounts while those toward the bottom of the wealth distribution received very little. A substantial gap in net wealth is seen between those who received or did not receive some wealth transfer. Controlling for age, gender, education and household size reduces the size of that gap but it remains substantial, especially in the US. We further look at how a marginal increase in the proportion of recipients of transfers of differing sizes would contribute to the shape of the overall wealth distribution using influence function regressions. Crucially, we show that the impact depends not only on the locations in the wealth distributions of recipients versus non-recipients, but also on the size of the receipt, an aspect which has been overlooked to date. In most countries, increasing the proportion of recipients of large transfers generally increases overall wealth inequality. In contrast, having more recipients of small or medium- sized transfers would be expected to reduce wealth inequality modestly, as they are more concentrated around the middle of the wealth distribution than non-recipients. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Zewde

The distribution of wealth has grown increasingly unequal, especially along racial lines. Lawmakers and researchers propose to address the issue with universal “baby bonds,” paid to every newborn and preserved until young adulthood. Bond values are tied inversely to wealth up to a $50,000 maximum investment. This study uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on the assets of young adults to simulate contemporary racial inequalities under a counterfactual policy environment in which the United States had administered baby bonds when the current cohort of young adults were newborns. Initial bond values are defined categorically by quintiles of household wealth observed in 1989 and 1994, smoothed across the inverse hyperbolic sine of household wealth, and then assumed to grow at 2% per year through 2015. Without baby bonds, young White Americans hold approximately 16 times the wealth of young Black Americans at the median ($46,000 vs. $2,900). Baby bonds reduce the disparity to a factor of 1.4 ($79,143 vs. $57,845), in the absence of intervening behavioral responses to the policy. The share held by the top decile decreases from 72% to 65%, marginally approaching the more egalitarian societies. Baby bonds considerably narrow wealth inequalities while simultaneously improving the net asset position of young adults and alleviating asset concentration.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur B. Kennickell

Since the work reported in Vermeulen [2018], a literature has developed on using the simple Pareto distribution along with “rich list” information to make improved estimates of the upper tail of the wealth distribution measured in surveys. Because the construction of such external data is typically opaque and subject to potentially serious measurement error, it may be best not to depend exclusively on this approach. This paper develops an alternative approach, using the generalized Pareto distribution (GPD), of which the simple Pareto is a subset, extending an estimation strategy developed by Castillo and Hadi [1997]. The greater flexibility of the GPD allows the possibility of modeling the tail of the wealth distribution, using a larger set of data for support than is typically the case with the simple Pareto. Moreover, the elaboration of the estimation method presented here allows explicitly for the possibility that the extreme of the observed upper tail is measured with error or that it is not captured at all. The approach also allows the incorporation of external data on total wealth as a constraint on the estimation. For the applications considered here using Austrian and U.S. micro data, the model relies on an estimate of total household wealth from national accounts, rather than rich-list information. The results suggest that where sufficiently comparable and reliable estimates of aggregate wealth are available, this approach can provide a useful way of mitigating problems in comparing distributional estimates across surveys that differ meaningfully in their effective coverage of the upper tail of the wealth distribution. The approach may be particularly useful in the construction of distributional national accounts. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)


2020 ◽  
pp. 69-89
Author(s):  
Tiago Bernardino

We argue that the relationship between wealth inequality and fiscal multipliers depends crucially on the type of fiscal experiment used, and on the measure of wealth distribution. We calibrate an overlapping generations model with incomplete markets for different European economies and use Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) data to compare fiscal multipliers when models are calibrated to match the distribution of gross vs. net wealth. We find a negative relationship between fiscal multipliers and wealth inequality when considering fiscal consolidation programs, in contrast to fiscal expansion experiments which are standard in the literature. The underlying mechanism relies on the relationship between the distribution of wealth and the share of credit‑ constrained agents. We examine the role of household balance sheet compositions regarding asset liquidity and find that when calibrating the model to match liquid wealth, the relationship between wealth inequality and fiscal multipliers is much stronger.


SERIEs ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Salas-Rojo ◽  
Juan Gabriel Rodríguez

AbstractThe literature has typically found that the distribution of socioeconomic factors like education, labor status and income does not account for the remarkable wealth inequality disparities between countries. As a result, their different institutions and other latent factors receive all the credit. Here, we propose to focus on one type of wealth inequality, the inequality of opportunities (IOp) in wealth: the share of overall wealth inequality explained by circumstances like inheritances and parental education. By means of a counterfactual decomposition method, we find that imposing the distribution of socioeconomic factors of the USA into Spain has little effect on total, financial and real estate wealth inequality. On the contrary, these factors play an important role when wealth IOp is considered. A Shapley value decomposition shows that the distribution of education and labor status in the USA consistently increase wealth IOp when imposed into Spain, whereas the opposite effect is found for the distribution of income.


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