Investigation of poverty indicators for designing case representation to determine urban poverty

Abstract

Poverty in Malaysia is a controversial economic issue. Although poverty alleviation strategies in Malaysia have been acclaimed success by United Nation Development Programme (UNDP, 2013), new form of poverty emerged in urban area as a result of rapid economic growth and development. Poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon and different societies have different perceptions of poverty. These will led to uncertainty in determining of poverty. Most of welfare institutions in Malaysia measure poverty from the monetary perspective using monthly income or expenditure. In practice, conventional institutions such as Jabatan Kebajikan Masyarakat Malaysia (JKMM) use monetary approach in determining poverty through the Poverty Line Income (PLI). While, Islamic institutions adopt the monetary approach in determining poverty using Had Al-Kifayah (HAK). The objective of this paper is to explain the concept and analyze the uncertainty factors that have contributed to the incidence of poverty in urban area using PLI and HAK method. This study would highlight the similarities and differences of both the methods. A survey aided by a structured questionnaire was carried out on 300 selected households in the state of Kuala Lumpur and 150 household datasets are obtained from Department of Zakat, Islamic Center, UTM, Johor. This empirical study will able to use in designing case representation for case-based reasoning that will be implemented in future work.