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Malaysia's Official Poverty Figures Missing Millions of People, Experts Say

Zsombor Peter

   KUALA LUMPUR - At 5:30 p.m. sharp, six days a week, the Pit Stop
   Community Café rolls up its metal shop door on a quiet street in
   central Kuala Lumpur and welcomes in some of the Malaysian capital's
   most needy for a warm, hearty meal, free of charge.

   Some of the café's regulars who count on the soup kitchen to make it
   through each day, though, earn too much to meet the government's
   definition of the poor. A growing number of experts, most recently from
   the U.N., say that the official numbers miss millions of people who
   would qualify as poor almost anywhere else, leaving them cut off from
   critical state benefits and with too few of others to make a
   difference.

   Having made only modest adjustments to its official poverty line since
   the 1970s, the government can claim to have all but routed poverty
   among its 32 million people, and at 0.4% Malaysia has the lowest
   self-reported poverty rate of any country for which the World Bank has
   figures. Neighboring Thailand claims an 8.6% poverty rate.

   The latest rebuke of Malaysia's figures came from U.N. Special
   Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston. After
   wrapping up an 11-day visit last month, he praised the government for
   "huge strides" in reducing poverty but called the current poverty line
   of about $234 a month "ridiculous." That sum would leave each person in
   a family of four living on less than $2 a day.

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