among policy makers and researchers, but also economic commentators, trade unions, political parties and NGOs. For these and other reasons, income statistics are socially considered important statistics.
In Malaysia, the equity issues, particularly poverty and income inequality, have also attracted a considerable amount of attention especially after the racial riot of 1969 and the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1971. As in many other Asian countries, economic growth in Malaysia has been rather impressive. Over the period of the NEP (1971-1990), the Malaysian economy has been growing at a rapid pace of 6.7 percent per annum, resulting in the almost four-fold increase in her real GDP from RM21.5 billion to RM79.1billion. During the 1991-1995 period, the Malaysian economy grew at an average annual rate of 8.7 percent. With this rapid economic growth, one obvious questions continues to be raised, viz: How are the gains from this remarkable growth distributed? In other words, what has been the impact of this rapid economic growth on the problems of poverty and income disparities in the country?
However, in attempting to examine the trend and pattern of income inequality and the poverty level in Malaysia, and to identify factors that will impinge on the progress towards achieving equitable development in the country, researchers will have to be concerned with three main questions: What are the data available for such an exercise?; are the data reliable and comparable?; and are the data accessible to researchers? These issues are important as it has important implications for understanding the problems of poverty and income disparities in Malaysia. As a small contribution towards assessing the extent the available data provide accurate picture of, as well as the direction to find future solutions to, the problems of poverty and income disparities in Malaysia, this paper will attempt to review selected issues related to the study of income distribution in Malaysia. It will first provide a brief picture on the trend of income inequality and poverty level in Malaysia during the 1971-1995 period. It then describes the principal sources of income data, its reliability, issues of comparability over time as well as problems connected with present-day Malaysian
