Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2019 · Maldives Bureau of Statistics
What a household earns,
and where it goes.
The census counts people and the national accounts count output. Only the Household Income and Expenditure Survey asks families directly what comes in and what goes out — which is the only way to see how unevenly a growing economy is shared. This is the 2019 round; the next is being collected now.
The richest tenth earns 8.7 times the poorest
The survey asked — household by household — where the money comes from and how much of it there is. A Malé household reported 2.0 times the monthly income of an atoll household, and the gap between the top and bottom of the national ladder is wider still.
median MVR 23,500 — half earn less
2.6 earners support each household
0 is perfect equality, 1 is one household with everything
average income per person in each
Income per person, by tenth of the population · Republic
Households ranked by income per person and cut into ten equal groups. The step from the ninth tenth to the tenth is the largest on the chart, which is what a Gini coefficient is measuring when it rises.
Where the money comes from
Share of total household income by source. Property income — rent — is a Malé phenomenon; transfers, which include remittances and pensions, matter far more in the atolls.
The same country, two different ladders
Rank every household in the country by income per person, cut the list into fifths, then ask where those people live. 33% of atoll residents fall in the national poorest fifth against 5% of Malé residents — and the richest fifth reverses it almost exactly.
A note on the Gini coefficient: MBS publishes the decile averages but not the coefficient itself, so the 0.299 shown above is calculated here from those ten numbers. Grouping into tenths hides the spread inside each one, which makes this a floor rather than an exact figure — the true value is slightly higher. It sits close to the World Bank’s own estimate for the same year.
In the atolls it is food; in Malé it is rent
The same survey records where the money goes. Nationally the two largest items are housing and food, but they trade places depending on where you live: an atoll household puts 31% of its spending into food against 18% in Malé, while housing takes 35% of a Malé budget against 11% in the atolls.
MVR 37,013 in Malé, MVR 20,177 in the atolls
MVR 236 against MVR 127
18% in Malé, where other costs crowd it out
rent alone is more than a quarter of it
Where the money goes, Malé against the atolls
Share of household spending by group. Two items account for most of the difference between the two places — housing and food — and they move in opposite directions.
Spending per person, fifth by fifth
Households ranked by spending per person and cut into fifths. The top fifth spends 5.1 times what the bottom fifth does. Note that these are not the income fifths shown above — the two books rank households on different measures, so the sets are not comparable and no attempt is made here to net one against the other.
The bigger the household, the less each person gets
Spending per person by household size. Some of this is genuine economy of scale — one kitchen, one electricity bill — but the fall is steep enough that a large household is doing less per person, not simply doing it more cheaply.
Two countries, measured by the tap
The survey also records the house itself. Nearly every household in Malé has drinking water it can trust and a sewer to connect to; in the atolls it is 27% and 48%, and 76% of households drink rain water as their main supply. What Malé has instead is rent: 74% of its households pay it, at 5.1 times the atoll rate.
against 100% in Malé
MVR 2,668 in the atolls
more than three people to a room
46% in the atolls, where many men work away
What reaches the house
Share of households with each service. The internet arrived nearly everywhere; water and sanitation did not, and those are the two that a household cannot substitute or do without.
Where the drinking water comes from
Main source of drinking water. Malé buys it in bottles; the atolls collect it from the roof, which ties a household's water supply to the rain and makes a dry season a household emergency.
Rent, by the size of the place
Average monthly rent. A one-bedroom flat in Malé costs more than a five-bedroom house in the atolls — which is the clearest single reason why 74% of Malé households rent and only 5% of atoll households do.
Two in five jobs are informal — and more than half in the atolls
Informal employment means work with no contract, no social protection and no employer keeping records: an own-account fisherman, a woman making handicraft at home, a shopkeeper with no payroll. It covers 39% of employed people nationally, 51% in the atolls against 28% in Malé, and it pays women a third of what it pays men.
44% of women, 36% of men
against 28% in Malé
men earn MVR 8,282 — 3.0 times as much
working for themselves, not for anyone
Informal employment, by place and by sex
Share of employed people whose work is informal. The atoll figure is nearly double Malé's, and in both places the rate is higher for women — the gap is widest where formal jobs are scarcest.
Who ends up in the informal sector
Share of each age group working in the informal sector. It is a young person’s first job and an old person’s last one: past 65 it is most of the work there is, because a pension does not stretch and formal employers do not hire.
The five biggest informal occupations
Number of people working informally in each, split by sex. Four of the five are almost entirely one sex or the other — handicraft, baking and tailoring are women’s work in these numbers, deep-sea fishing is men’s — which is why the earnings gap in informal work is so wide.