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The Asian financial crisis and its social aftermath triggered a fundamental reappraisal of the role of social protection in Asia. Existing social protection programmes in many Asian countries were found to be insufficient and not well designed.
This study is an evaluation on how effective various Indonesian social safety net programs have been in reaching their intended target, i.e., the traditionally poor and the newly poor due to the crisis. This is done by assessing the coverage of the programs among the poor as well as how the benefits of the programs have been distributed between the poor and the non-poor.
In January 1998 a significant policy reform deregulated agriculture in Indonesia. It sought to eliminate distorting local monopolies, monopsonies, trade restrictions, interisland maximum shipment quotas and other barriers that effectively lowered farmgate prices. Many of these had been constructed to benefit the Soeharto family and their business cronies.
This article uses repeated cross-sectional data for the years 1986 to 1998 to examine how the median and spread in the distribution of wages among workers of different age and gender were affected by the economic growth and contraction in output during this period. It finds that it is mainly the younger cohorts of male and female workers that have reaped the benefits of the growing employment and wages in the formal sector.
During the economic crisis, the poverty rate in Indonesia changed relatively quickly in short periods of time, implying that there were a large number of households which moved in and out of poverty relatively frequently and experienced relatively short periods of poverty.
