Household Behavior towards Debt in a Challenging Financial Environment in Malaysia

Abstract

The study of household behaviour towards debt is important in this challenging financial environment. Escalating household debt can cause social and economic problems. For the past few years Malaysia has emerged as the highest household debt country in the ASEAN region. Therefore this study aims to examine the predictors of intention to incur household debt among Malaysian households. Analysis on 100 usable questionnaires in the pilot study revealed financial literacy and subjective norm as significant predictors of attitude and the mediating relationship between attitude and intention to incur on household debt was found to be negatively significant.Keywords: Household behaviour; household debt; financial environment; financial literacy2398-4295 © 2017 The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, UniversitiTeknologi MARA, Malaysia.