National

This publication is only available in Bahasa Indonesia.

This study examines the impact of village fund (VF) transfers on rural welfare in Indonesia. We use the monthly night-time light (NTL) dataset as a proxy for rural welfare for around 75,000 villages from 2014 to 2019. Using Regression Discontinuity in Time (RDiT), we find that VF positively impacts rural welfare, as the value of Average Light Intensity (ALI) increases by almost 97% after the implementation of VF. The highest influence of VF transfers is revealed to be in underdeveloped villages.

Tech startups require an ecosystem of support that differs from the assistance provided to traditional small enterprises. The ecosystem should comprise not only dedicated government policies and programs, but also financing solutions, support from incubator and accelerator programs, and talent development (human resources) versed in technological innovation, but also in inventing new business models. The ecosystem includes public, private, and quasi-public players. Building this ecosystem is critical to developing a vibrant community of tech startups.

Covid-19 has infected and will continue to infect millions of people all over the world. The economic impact is predicted to be large and millions of people will be pushed into poverty. In this paper, we estimate the impact of Covid-19 on poverty in Indonesia. The economic impact is expected to be severe, reducing the economic growth rate projected for 2020 from about 5% to between 4.2% and –3.5%. We find that under the best-case scenario, the poverty rate will increase from 9.2% in September 2019 to 9.7% by the end of 2020, pushing 1.3 million more people into poverty.

Short-term unconditional cash transfers are used as a temporary mitigation strategy during adverse economic shocks. They can however, cause adverse unintended impacts on behaviour and preferences. We estimate the effect of receiving short-term unconditional cash transfers on behaviour, risk aversion, and intertemporal choice in Indonesia. The country first introduced the program in 2005 and continues to use it whenever adverse economic shocks occur. With 15.5 million beneficiary households, the program remains one of the largest in the world.

This paper assesses the impact of covid-19 pandemic, measured through work mobility reduction, and e-commerce growth on the labour market using data from Indonesian labour force surveys and e-commerce transaction values. The findings confirm that the pandemic adversely affects workers’ employment prospects, work hours, total earnings, and hourly earnings. E-commerce growth does not counteract the adverse impact of the pandemic as expected, but it plays a role as an employment buffer during the crisis, although it tends to suppress workers’ earnings.

In this study, we use a rich household longitudinal data set from Indonesia that spans 19 years, from 1996 to 2014, to examine the livelihood of informal workers. The data also allow us to differentiate between low-tier and high-tier informal and formal workers. Finally, the data span a period in which Indonesia grew from a low-income to a middle-income country. Thus, we were able to examine changes in the proportion of low-tier informal workers as an economy grows. In particular, we address the following research questions:

This publication is only available in Bahasa Indonesia.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proved that digital transformation is a must for the public sector. In fact, the initiative to go digital in Indonesia was started when Presidential Instruction No. 3/2003 on National Policy and Strategy on e-Government was issued and later re-intensified in 2018 when Presidential Regulation No. 95/2018 on e-Government was issued. However, it takes digital skills in public sector to implement e-Government. In reality, only limited numbers of government employees have digital skills as explicitly written in Presidential Regulation No. 95/2018.