Income, wealth and poverty statistics

Albert Dimech (February 12) would have done well to refer to the methodological notes in the NSO's publication entitled Survey on Income and Living Conditions, which has been online for the past eight months.

He would then have understood better how the at-risk-of-poverty statistics are compiled.

The EU-SILC is an official European source of statistics on household income distribution and aims to provide a complete set of indicators on relative poverty, social exclusion, pensions and material deprivation.

Most significantly, the survey is an inquiry into the segments of the populations that are at-risk-of-poverty. An investigation of wealth per se is not within the remit of the EU-SILC. In fact, the compilation of equivalised income takes into account a number of regular-income components that are, for the most part, unrelated to wealth. Other wealth-related factors, such as cars owned by the household, property ownership and assets, are not taken into consideration by the EU-SILC methodology.

Furthermore, Mr Dimech does not distinguish between absolute poverty and relative poverty. The 14 per cent refers to relative poverty and indicates that share of the Maltese population with an equivalised disposable income below the at-risk-of-poverty threshold.