COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Effects on Household Income in Malaysia during Lockdown

Abstract

The goal of this study is to identify the most vulnerable socioeconomic group of people to the effects of the pandemic as well as to examine the socioeconomic group that is more likely to be affected, in terms of income loss, by the pandemic. The data were collected via online questionnaire to the 395 respondents in Malaysia. The dependent variable involved in this study was income loss while the predicted variables included were age, gender, gross household income, employment sector, residential environment, education level and status of ‘Bantuan Sara Hidup’ (BSH) one-off relief. By employing Multinomial Logit Regression (MLoR) analysis via IBM SPSS Statistics 24, the most significant predictor is employment sector (P = 0.000), where those who are business owner, self-employed and unemployed are the most susceptible to the income loss due to COVID-19. The finding indicated those who own business or self-employed were 4.098 times more likely to have their income decrease (P = 0.002) while the unemployed respondents were 6.725 times more likely to have their income decrease (P = 0.014) rather than no changes in income during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Deterioration in Quality of Life among COVID-19 Survivors: Population-Based Cohort Study

“…In a national survey conducted in China between 20 March 2020 and 29 April 2020, almost half (47.51%) of the respondents reported partial income loss—that is, a somewhat lower income than their income before the COVID-19 outbreak [ 18 ]. Similar results were reported in Malaysia during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown [ 19 ]. Our results are valuable from two perspectives.…”

“…Our results are valuable from two perspectives. First, most previous studies have focused on household income loss using surveys [ 18 , 19 ], which may have introduced biases such as non-response, response, selection, and volunteer bias [ 20 ]. However, our study used data from the NHIS database, which contains the annual household income of all individuals, to determine insurance premiums in the year as the sole public health insurance in South Korea.…”

The Immediate Impacts of COVID-19 on Low-Income Households: Evidence from Malaysia

“…Multinomial logistic regression allows for the inclusion of three categories of dependent variables, in this case, households that are forced to accept income reduction, households whose incomes are not affected, and those with an increase in income. A similar technique was used by [22,40]. The reference category is household whose income was not affected.…”