Unequal income growing

Namibia's income distribution is still highly unequal with only 10% of the households with the highest income still accounting for nearly half the total income, the director general of the National Planning Commission, Helmut Angula, said this week. Angula was releasing the results of the country's latest budget study, the Household Income and Expenditure Survey.

He said Namibia was still suffering from unequal distribution of income, which it inherited at independence. The survey is for the period 2003/04. The first survey was for 1993/4. The survey showed that 2% households with the highest income accounted for 15% while one quarter of all Namibian households with the lowest income accounted for only 6% of the country's total income. The survey showed that the per capita income for 25% households with the lowest income was about N$1,600 compared to almost N$150 000 for the 2% households with the highest income.

“The GINI co-efficient for Namibia is 0.6, which is an indication of a highly unequal income distribution,” Angula told a news conference. The Population Project for the period 2001/15 which was also launched on Tuesday projects the country's population to increase to 2.3 million by 2015.