Our Expertise
This study provides an overview of the concepts used to measure unemployment in Indonesia and their consequences for the measured unemployment trends. One finding shows that BPS’s decision in 2001 to relax the definition of labor force by including discouraged workers has resulted in an artificially high open unemployment rate and disguises the actual decline in traditionally-measured open unemployment rates post-crisis.
Although in general less prevalent than other developing countries at similar stage of development, the problem of child labor in Indonesia is significant. Like in other countries, this study finds that there is a strong link between the child labor phenomenon and poverty. The profile of child labor largely mirrors the profile of poverty. Furthermore, poverty is found as an important determinant of working for children.
Although consumption expenditure data is crucial for assessing the level of people’s welfare and calculating important welfare measures such as the poverty headcount rate, collecting such data requires significant time and effort. In this study, we experiment with three approaches to predict consumption expenditure and poverty at household and aggregate level as simpler alternatives to using consumption expenditure.
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.
