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Social protection programs are underway to help assist individuals, households, and communities to better manage risk as well as to provide support to the chronically poor. In pre-crisis Indonesia, formal social protection programs hardly existed and most social protection was achieved through informal arrangements.
Towards the end of year 2000, a group of researchers from the Social Monitoring and Early Response Unit (SMERU) Research Institute in Jakarta conducted a study of small-scale rural credit in a number of villages traditionally associated with wet-rice cultivation in the Cirebon area of West Java.
It is well known that the economic crisis in Indonesia has caused the poverty rate to increase significantly. The present study finds, not only that the poverty rate increased significantly, but also that much of the increase was due to a large increase in the chronic poor category (i.e. the poor who have expected consumption below the poverty line and most likely will stay poor in the near future).
This paper examines the impact of export orientation, import competition, foreign ownership, and the rate of capital accumulation on the relative demand for skilled and unskilled labor in pre-crisis Indonesia.
Since the late 1980s, minimum wages have become an important plank of the Indonesian government's labour policy. Their levels have increased faster in real terms than those of average wages and per capita gross domestic product and, as a result, minimum wages have become binding for the majority of formal sector workers.
