COMMENT One question which has often been nagging at the back of my head is this - if the economic indicators for rural Sarawak is as bad as what I’ve outlined, why are there so few poor households in the official statistics for Sarawak?

I think I’ve found an important component of the answer to this question in the Labour Force Survey 2014 data. According to this survey, 17.2 percent of the 15-19 age cohort in urban Sarawak are in the workforce, which puts Sarawak in the second position behind urban Sabah, at 24.4 percent.