Poverty and Inequality Analysis
Recently The SMERU Research Institute and its close associates were shocked by the sudden death of one of the Institute’s leading researchers, Wenefrida Widyanti. Her death was not only a great loss to the Institute, because she played a significant role in many of SMERU’s research projects, but also for the Indonesian research community at large.
Is it people themselves or the environment around them that predominantly determines their course of life? The answer to this question has long been debated by social scientists. Some experts think that structural factors play a more important role in changing the community, while others think that individual (agency) factors have more of a significant role.
The first child poverty and disparity study conducted in Indonesia in 2010–2011 revealed that in 2009, despite progress made towards reducing income deprivation and other dimensions of deprivation, around 55.8% of Indonesian children lived in households with a per capita consumption of less than PPP $2 a day, 17.4% lived below the official (national) poverty line, and 10.6% lived on less than PPP $1 per day.
The dynamics of poverty in Indonesia are becoming more complex, resulting in such conditions that the old approaches to poverty reduction through targeted programs run by individual institutions are no longer adequate. This is because the poor population has decreased and is now more difficult to identify. To make things worse, there has a growing population of both economically and socially vulnerable people.
The results of a 2011 SMERU study on urban spatial poverty and the relationship between city spatial planning and efforts to reduce poverty in Kota (the City of) Surakarta and Kota Makassar suggest that there is only a limited understanding by stakeholders, particularly the local government work units (SKPD), of the relationship between the elements of spatial planning and efforts to reduce poverty.
