The Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) released the results of the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES; formerly known as Household Budget Survey) conducted from March 2023 to March 2024. HIES, which is carried out once every five years, aims to understand the consumption pattern and income distribution of the households in Macao. The latest data will be used to update the Consumer Price Index basket of goods and services and their respective weights, as well as to revise the basis for calculating private consumption expenditure of Gross Domestic Product.
Survey results indicated that there were 204,177 households in Macao, up by 12,904 or 6.7% from five years ago1 (2017/2018 HIES). The rise was driven by an increase of 10,223 households living in the Parish of N. S. de Fátima, Taipa and Coloane.
Household size shrank compared to five years ago, with the average number of household members decreasing from 3.04 persons in 2017/2018 to 2.83 persons in 2023/2024, which was due to a fall of 6.8 percentage points in the proportion of three or more person households (54.2%). Number of one-person households and two-person households grew notably by 25.9% and 25.3% respectively. Average monthly household income (including employment income, property income, monetary and non-monetary transfer receipts) was MOP58,835, up slightly by 0.4% in real terms from 2017/2018. The small increase in income was attributed to the shrinking household size. With a decrease in household size, monthly per-capita income (average monthly household income divided by average number of household members) rose by 7.8% in real terms to MOP20,815. Employment income remained the main source of household income, taking up 67.0% of the total. Monetary transfer receipts came next, constituting 19.4%.
Over the past five years, in addition to the recurrent annual subsidies and financial aid (e.g. cash handouts, old-age pension, healthcare vouchers), the Government released a series of welfare benefits to stabilise livelihood in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, such as four rounds of “electronic consumption benefits plan”, “training programme with subsidy”, and “the Employee, Freelancer and Business Subsidy Scheme”. As a result, the average monthly amount of government subsidies and financial aid provided to households in 2023/2024 saw an uplift of 42.1%.
Among the 5 equally-sized household groups ranked in ascending order of household income, the share of monetary transfer receipts for households in the lowest quintile group was the largest, at 48.2%, while their share of employment income was 29.0%. The corresponding shares for the households in the highest quintile group were 12.2% and 76.7% respectively. This indicated that government subsidies and financial aid had a notable impact on the income level of households in lower income quintiles.
In 2023/2024, the average monthly household consumption expenditure was MOP38,115, up by 1.7% in real terms from five years ago. Monthly per-capita consumption expenditure rose by 9.2% to MOP13,484, which grew faster than monthly consumption expenditure of households as the decrease in the average household size led to fewer household members sharing some of the recurrent expenses (e.g. rentals for dwellings, electricity charges).
Analysed by section of goods and services, households spent the most on “Housing & Fuels”, which constituted 25.0% of the household consumption expenditure, albeit a drop of 1.9 percentage points from 2017/2018. Household spending on “Food & Non-Alcoholic Beverages” ranked second, taking up 24.7% of the total, up by 2.7 percentage points.
Gini coefficient is an indicator used internationally for measuring the degree of equality of income distribution. Value of the coefficient lies between 0 and 1. The closer the value is to 0, the greater the level of income equality is; on the contrary, the closer the value is to 1, the greater the level of income inequality. The per-capita Gini coefficient of Macao was 0.324 in 2023/2024, a slight increase of 0.009 from the value of 0.315 in 2017/2018. After excluding government subsidies and financial aid, the per-capita Gini coefficient was 0.396, which reflected that government welfare benefits had a positive impact on improving household income distribution.
1 2017/2018 HIES was carried out from October 2017 to September 2018, which is about 5 years apart from the launch of the latest round of HIES in 2023