Ways to bridge the income gap

IMAGINE the total wealth generated worldwide as one big, sumptuous cake. Last year, the world’s richest one percent of people wolfed down a whopping 82% of the cake. The working class had to feed on the remaining leftovers.

But the 3.6 billion people that constitute the world’s poorest section of the population received nothing!

Those figures were revealed in the “Reward Work, Not Wealth” report released by Oxfam recently. Globally, inequality is prevailing and fracturing the society.

In fact, since 2010 the wealth of billionaires has been growing six times faster than that of ordinary workers.

Just last year, Oxfam reported that the world’s eight richest billionaires owned as much wealth as the poorest half of the world.

These individuals include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckenberg.

In this era of rising inequality, how is Malaysia faring? Recently, the Khazanah Research Institute revealed that the Gini coefficient reduced to 0.39 last year from 0.51 in 1970.

As the number gets smaller, the Gini coefficient implies that the disparity in incomes is shrinking between the people. However, the struggles that the middle and low-income groups face in coping with the rising cost of liv- ing remain to be addressed.

One important way to tackle inequality is by empowering the low and middle-income groups with the ability to generate passive income. In Malaysia, one good example would be the My Suria programme launched in 2017.

Through this initiative, more than 1,600 households nationwide from the B40 low-income group had solar panels installed on their rooftops.

The electricity that was generated by the solar panels would be sold to Tenaga Nasional Bhd. Besides promoting green energy consumption, each participant could also earn up to RM600 extra income per month.

More similar initiatives should be introduced to improve the economic status of the low and middle-income groups. Full-time housewives could be the target groups. Assisting them to engage in work-from-home freelance jobs or training them to become small-scale entrepreneurs could make a huge difference to the entire household’s economic wellbeing. What better way could there be to celebrate 2018 as the Women Empowerment Year?

Teaching the rakyat to fish would certainly add value to their livelihood. DHESEGAAN BALA KRISHNAN Universiti Malaya