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Background and Purpose: Poverty, despite being a multifaceted concept, is commonly measured in either absolute or relative monetary terms. However, it can also be measured subjectively, as people form perceptions on their relative income, welfare, and life satisfaction. Poverty measurement based on objective indicators such as official poverty lines is often used to orient and prioritize policy actions. However, such 'standard' poverty measures based on household consumption or income aggregates have several shortcomings. This objective indicator does little to inform policy makers about public preferences. The main goal of this paper is to investigate multifaceted poverty measurement by combining objective and subjective measures to provide useful insights into poverty in Malaysia. In addition, this study explored the multifaceted poverty incidence among the low-income household from the perspective of zakat applicants. Methodology: Data was collected using a survey and interviews of zakat applicants under the category of poor and needy in the State Islamic Religious Council (SIRC) of Melaka, one of the states in Malaysia. Three poverty measurements, i.e., Poverty Line Income (PLI), Haddul Kifayah and Subjective Poverty Index (SPI), are utilized in this study. Findings: The PLI and Haddul Kifayah are categorized as objective poverty measures, while SPI is categorized as a subjective poverty measure. The different measures of poverty would produce different analytical results that, in turn, call for a different set of policy interventions. Contributions: These findings point to the needs of tailor-made strategies for the society to cope with multifaceted poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on living arrangements predict poor older Malaysians by sex disaggregation. The respondents in this paper are 60 years old and above in 2016, to a total n=2467 (50.8% men, and 49.2% female) from 91 districts in Malaysia. The majority poor male (64.92%), and female (60.3%) respondents are living with children. Three types of significant (p<0.05) living arrangements predict poor male respondents are living with-spouse-only (odd=8.357) with children (odd=5.141), and with relative (odd=2.514). Three types of significant (p<0.05) living arrangements predict poor female respondents are living with-spouse-only (odd=53.333) with children (odd=8.69), and with relative (odd=3.257). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defining the poverty line has been acknowledged as being highly variable by the majority of published literature. Despite long discussions and successes, poverty line has a number of problems due to its arbitrary nature. This paper proposes three measurements of poverty lines using membership functions based on fuzzy set theory. The three membership functions, namely exponential, trapezoidal and quadratic sigmoid together with their calculation steps are discussed. Average monthly household incomes of Malaysians are used to illustrate the proposed poverty line. Three new sets of poverty lines were derived for 3 years as numerical application to the proposed membership functions. The numerical results show the flexibility of poverty lines resulted from the composition of the proposed functions. It suggests that the official poverty line for Malaysians is too low thus creating an underestimation of the extent of poverty in Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]