Our Expertise
The impact of the global financial crisis (GFC) in Indonesia started to be felt when the economic growth slowed sharply at the end of 2008. Even though the economy still showed some resilience towards the GFC compared to the neighboring countries, marked by 4.4% GDP growth in the first quarter of 2009, we observed a rapid contraction in trade, large declines in export, and major falls in prices of important commodities.
Indonesia faces enormous challenges in emigration governance. With an annual placement of not less than half a million people, three quarters of whom are women working in the domestic sphere, overseas employment is indeed a task too huge for the central government to handle alone. More often than seldom, the issues of human rights emerge in combination with the massive outflow of migrant workers.
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.
