Our Expertise
This study investigates regional and ethnic inequality in Indonesia from five dimensions: access to education and health facilities, education outcome, health outcome, voice, as well as income and consumption. We believe this is the first comprehensive study that looks at ethnic inequality in Indonesia. We find systematic inequality between urban and rural areas, but not between ethnic groups.
In a fast urbanizing Indonesia, the rural sector still plays an important role in the country’s economy. Although declining, the majority of the population still live and find employment in rural areas. However, rural areas lag behind urban areas in many aspects. As a result, around 80% of all the poor in the country are found in rural areas.
This study extends the literature on the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction by differentiating growth and poverty into their sectoral compositions and locations. We find that growth in the rural services sector reduces poverty in all sectors and locations. However, in terms of elasticity of poverty, urban services growth has the largest for all sectors except urban agriculture.
In this study we investigate the causes of low secondary school enrollment in Indonesia despite near universal primary school attendance. We then find that attrition during the transition between primary and junior secondary education levels is the main cause. We investigate the causes of attrition using a longitudinal household survey dataset.
Most of the unemployed in Indonesia are young and inexperienced, still live with their parents, and have at least 12 years of education. Starting with the premise that efforts to reduce unemployment should take into account the characteristics of the unemployed, we develop a model to look at the impact of different sectors and locations of economic growth on urban, rural, and national employment using a provincial level panel dataset.
