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This paper explores the spatial heterogeneity in the human capital potential of Indonesia's next generation by constructing and analyzing sub-national human capital indices (HCI) for 34 provinces and 514 districts in Indonesia. The paper identifies data and methodological constraints in the construction of these sub-national indices and proposes and implements strategies to overcome these challenges. Several interesting findings emerge from the analysis. First, Indonesian's young generation can only achieve 53% of their future productivity relative to the full benchmark of health and education. Second, the variation in aggregate human capital potential across space in Indonesia is staggering: some parts of country are almost at par with countries like Vietnam and China while others have human capital levels that are comparable to Chad, Niger, and Sierra Leone. Third, differences in learning outcomes as measured by harmonized test scores account for the largest share of the variation in human capital across Indonesia, suggesting that the challenge of providing quality education remains one of the most important obstacles to equalizing opportunities for the next generation of Indonesians. And fourth, the correlation between government spending and performance on HCI at the district level appears rather weak, reinforcing conclusions reached by other recent studies that have highlighted the importance of focusing on the quality of spending. Finally, this paper also shows that Indonesia's human capital registered a modest improvement from 0.50 in 2013 to 0.53 in 2018 with stronger progress observed among the already top performing provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study on poverty dynamics has become more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study gives insights into the scale of poverty and vulnerability transitions for 2019–2020 and the characteristics associated with each transition. Since panel data are unavailable for Indonesia, this study uses cross-sectional data and demonstrates the synthetic panels approach. The finding shows that the COVID-19 has induced poverty persistence in Indonesia as the economic shutdown took place. However, the pandemic impact is not uniformly distributed among Indonesian households. Those who fell into poverty during the pandemic most likely came from the vulnerable group, especially those living in rural areas, illiterate or with less education. The findings of this study, therefore, underlines the importance of literacy and education in poverty alleviation. This paper also highlights the urgency for redesigned poverty interventions as the economic shock has created new vulnerable groups. Higher probability of becoming vulnerable to poverty during the pandemic is associated with living in urban areas, having females as the household head, being a university graduate, and working in service sectors. Lastly, this study found that the synthetic panel estimates are sensitive to the assumptions made and how the key parameters are estimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial inclusion is a policy priority in both developed and developing countries. Yet almost one in four people remain financially excluded around the globe, with the vast majority living in the developing world. In this paper, we argue that financial resilience: an individual's ability to function effectively in adverse financial situations, can better help us assist people to cope with financial adversity, develop effective policy and, ultimately, improve economic development. This paper builds on an existing financial resilience measurement framework and adapts it to develop a measure appropriate to the context of developing countries. Indonesia, where one in three people are financially excluded, is used as a case country from which to draw conclusions. We use the Indonesia Family Life Survey and put forward the country's first snapshot of financial resilience. Implications for research and policy are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policymakers seeking to target health policies efficiently towards specific population groups need to know which individuals stand to benefit the most from each of these policies. While traditional approaches for subgroup analyses are constrained to only consider a small number of pre-defined subgroups, recently proposed causal machine learning (CML) approaches help explore treatment-effect heterogeneity in a more flexible yet principled way. Causal forests use a generalisation of the random forest algorithm to estimate heterogenous treatment effects both at the individual and the subgroup level. Our paper aims to explore this approach in the setting of health policy evaluation with strong observed confounding, applied specifically to the context of mothers' health insurance enrolment in Indonesia. Comparing two health insurance schemes (subsidised and contributory) against no insurance, we find beneficial average impacts of enrolment in contributory health insurance on maternal health care utilisation and infant mortality, but no impact of subsidised health insurance. The causal forest algorithm identified significant heterogeneity in the impacts of contributory insurance, not just along socioeconomic variables that we pre-specified (indicating higher benefits for poorer, less educated, and rural women), but also according to some other characteristics not foreseen prior to the analysis, suggesting in particular important geographical impact heterogeneity. Our study demonstrates the power of CML approaches to uncover unexpected heterogeneity in policy impacts. The findings from our evaluation of past health insurance expansions can potentially guide the re-design of the eligibility criteria for subsidised health insurance in Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to assess India's performance in generating the required quantity and quality of employment for its growing population since independence in 1947. But the exercise is set in a longer period that covers India's population growth since the turn of the twentieth century (1901) in relation to its ability to generate employment. The half-a-century preceding independence, despite a slow population growth, was a disaster in generating employment and any signs of structural change. Detailed analysis of the issue since independence shows that there was indeed a demographic burden more than the world average as well as its comparator Asian countries such as China and Indonesia. While employment generation with reference to growth—employment elasticity—was quite impressive during the first four decades of independence, it almost collapsed ever since the adoption of neoliberal economic reforms in 1991, thus entering a phase of 'jobless growth', a phenomenon that is shared by China in a more vigorous form. This has led to what may be called an exclusion of working age people from not just employment but from labour force indicating the emergence of 'discouraged workers' in a larger set that we called underutilized labour. But what about those who are included in the workforce? Does it ensure an escape from poverty for those at the bottom? Our estimates show that the pace of reduction in the incidence of poverty is so slow that a significant share of households is still below the international definition of extreme poverty. We attribute this to the quality of employment characterized by a high incidence of informal sector employment as well as low wages measured by the share of workers not receiving a recommended subsistence wage. The absence of any kind of social security to an overwhelming share of workers adds to this situation of absolute poverty. Finally we examine the question of poverty from the point of manifold inequalities by dividing the households in the economy in terms of their employment, educational, rural–urban, and social group statuses for estimating predicted probability of being poor. The results bring into sharp focus the huge variation in predicted probability that shows households with low education, disadvantaged social group status, casual nature of employment, and living in rural areas at the bottom end of the scale. These results bring out the imperative for creating more employment with better quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of poverty as an experience of multiple deprivation has been widely acknowledged. In Indonesia, however, poverty assessment has almost exclusively been conducted within the monetary space; even when multidimensionality is admitted, it has always been computed using variants of marginal method that are indifferent to joint deprivation. Applying a novel measurement method that is sensitive to both the incidence and the intensity of multiple deprivation to data from the National Socio-economic Survey (Susenas), this paper investigates the extent and the patterns of multidimensional poverty in Indonesia from 2003 to 2013 ( $$N=7{,}148{,}964$$ ). An Indonesian version of the multidimensional poverty index is constructed by augmenting the existing consumption poverty measure with information on health and education. Results suggest that there was an unambiguous poverty reduction over the last decade at both national and sub-national levels. The data also reveal that progress has been inclusive across population subgroups, although spatial variation remains notable. The new poverty measurement method proves to be easily adaptable to the Indonesian context and could complement the methods currently employed by the Indonesian Statistical Bureau. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: The purpose of this paper is to define the reasons for and the rates of absenteeism in Indonesian Community Health Centres and determine the pattern of health workers non-attendance in Indonesian public health facilities, chiefly in urban areas. Subject and methods: This research uses descriptive statistics methodology to sample a survey carried out in this case in Bengkulu City, Bengkulu Province, Sumatra in the Republic of Indonesia. The survey sampled 9 community health centres and involved the 20 doctors, 61 midwives and 76 paramedics who were employed at these institutions. Results: This research revealed that the level of health worker absenteeism in Bengkulu city was overall 23.4 %, this encompassed doctors at 26.5 %, midwives at 22.8 % and paramedics at 23.2 %. Conclusion: This study determined the absenteeism pattern of the health workers at these institutions and the reasons for their absences. Most of the recorded absences occurred at certain times of the day during similar periods, the highest level of absenteeism occurring on the weekend during the Saturday work period. It was also found that on most workdays many of the health workers were leaving the community health centres around 10:30 AM just before the closing time of the patient registration desk at 11:00 AM, even though the official closing time of is actually 1:30 PM. Additionally, on another point we found that there was no strong relationship between the actual working conditions and the absence rate of health workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the determinants of household-level energy poverty in Indonesia by using highly granular, household-level socioeconomic data on Indonesia from the 2015–2019 National Socioeconomic Survey (SUSENAS). This study utilizes two distinct methods to assess energy poverty in Indonesia with regard to accessibility, aiming to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the issue. Using logistic regression with the combination of district-level fixed effects and interactions between regional and yearly terms, this study finds that, in general, the likelihood of a household being under energy poverty is negatively associated with household expenditure, dwelling size, family size, full-time employment status, and the marital status and educational attainment of the household head, while the associations with other determinants, such as the gender of the household head and LPG and electricity prices, are positive. These associations between the incidence of energy poverty and households' socioeconomic and demographic variables, as well as the prices of modern and alternative energy, are in parallel with the findings from other similar studies that have been conducted in other developing countries or regions. Furthermore, this study finds some substantial variations in the estimation results for Java and outside Java. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effects of the investment-based presence of multinational enterprises (MNEs) on poverty in developing countries. The relationship is decomposed into different pathways corresponding to various facets of firms' presence and activities, and monetary and multidimensional poverty. We hypothesize that depending on the pathways, the effects can be positive or negative in terms of poverty alleviation, and an overall conclusion has to be nuanced. The hypotheses are tested across 431 Indonesian administrative districts, observed in 2008, 2014 and 2018. Pooled instrumental variable regressions show that a higher presence of foreign MNEs does not reduce the number of people below the poverty line. It raises the depth and severity of poverty, and the population is also more exposed to pollutions. These results inform the ongoing debate, and offer important implications for policy makers eager to attract foreign direct investments, as well as for MNEs' managers concerned with social responsibility and achieving sustainable development goals in host developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes irrigation-poverty linkages, and determines how and to what extent irrigation contributes to poverty alleviation, and whether there are any spatial patterns in poverty in irrigation systems. It also identifies conditions under which irrigation has greater anti-poverty impacts. The analysis is based on primary data collected during the 2000-2001 agricultural year, from four selected irrigation systems and rainfed areas in Java. The results indicate that irrigation has significant poverty reducing impacts. Poverty varies across irrigation systems and across locations within the systems. In general, crop productivity is relatively higher and poverty is lower in middle parts of the systems compared to head and tail parts. Further, locational differences in poverty are more pronounced in larger systems where locational inequities in water distribution and productivity differences are also high. Crop productivity, the size of landholdings and location of households are important determinants of poverty, in addition to demographic factors such as family size. The smaller the systems with well managed infrastructure, relatively equitable water distribution and diversified cropping patterns supported with market infrastructure, the greater the poverty reducing impacts of irrigation. Overall, the study findings suggest that improving the performance of irrigation systems by enhancing land and water productivity, diversifying cropping patterns and improving water distribution across locations would help reduce poverty in presently low productivity-high poverty parts of the systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the agent dynamics, learning processes, and enabling conditions for the implementation of microscale win-win solutions that contribute to energy poverty eradication and climate resilience in a selection of low-income rural and peri-urban communities in India, Indonesia, and South Africa. We define these micro-solutions as energy-related interventions and resilience services or products—used at community, household, small production unit, or business level—that yield both economic and climatic gains. Our analysis identifies five elements critical for the robust design of these interventions: (i) The ability to collaborate and share different kinds of expertise with a range of networks operating at multiple levels of activity; (ii) The application of place-based systems-learning perspectives that enable project participants to integrate different types of solutions to meet different needs at the same time; (iii) The ability to yield tangible short-term benefits as part of long-term strategic visions and commitment; (iv) The use of novel technologies and financial instruments in ways that foreground the needs of poor populations; and (v) The inclusion and empowerment of economically marginalised groups through institutional and technological innovations and responsible business models. We conclude that the most critical aspect of successful micro win-win solutions is support for communities' own endogenous transformative capacities as this helps ensure that solutions are shared and continuously adapted to changing conditions over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We critically review conceptual and empirical issues surrounding the derivation of the international poverty line, expressed in PPP-adjusted dollars and linked to various rounds of the International Comparison Program (ICP). We find that there are some limitations in the current estimation of these lines, but show that statistically superior methods lead to lines that are relatively robust and confirm the $1.25 using 2005 PPPs and suggest $1.67-1.71 using 2011 PPPs (or close to the $1.90 proposed by the World Bank if we follow the World Bank's approach of adjusting inflation rates in some countries); they also roughly confirm the current shape of the proposed 'weakly relative' poverty line. Using the new absolute line based on 2011 PPPs would lead to substantially lower poverty in our estimation. The extent of the decline depends on whether and how one treats China, India, and Indonesia differently from other countries in the 2005 and 2011 PPPs. More seriously, we note that the dependence on successive ICP rounds creates conceptual and empirical problems that have become worse over time so that we suggest that it would be best to consider alternatives to the current reliance on ICP rounds and the resulting PPPs. As a short-term solution we propose to fix the international poverty line in national currencies using either the 2005 or 2011 level; in the medium term, we argue for global poverty measurement based on internationally coordinated national poverty measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Some of the possible reasons for deteriorating mental health among forced migrants have been identified as poverty, traumatic experiences before migration and postmigration negative life events. Previous studies suggest that the prevalence of psychological distress of forced migrants is higher among women than men. However, there is a lack of studies of internally displaced persons (IDP) that assess the relationship between psychological distress and selected variables in low income countries.Objectives: This study aims to assess the association between poverty, household roles and psychological distress among IDP in Ambon, Indonesia, and to identify different risk factors of psychological distress across household roles.Methods: In a cross-sectional study carried out in Ambon from July to September 2005, 460 adults were recruited from 200 households in 10 camp locations on Ambon Island. The Hopkins Symptom Check List-25 was used as a dichotomous variable ("case" score >/= 1.75) to measure psychological distress, and questionnaires were used to measure socioeconomic level, trauma experiences related to conflict and current health conditions. Data were collected through face-to-face structured interviews.Results: The overall prevalence of psychological distress was 47%. Prevalence was highest among women, regardless of their household roles (55%), and lowest among men (37%). Different risk factors for psychological distress were identified for each household role. Poverty-related risk factors were only significant among "mothers". An important risk factor for "fathers" was long-term illness (lasting more than three months), and for "mothers" was witnessed murder.Conclusion: Different risk factors were identified for each household role of IDP, indicating that their mental health care requirements may be different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent focus on ‘pro-poor growth’ led also to an intense debate on how exactly to define and to measure pro-poor growth. All suggested measures have in common that they are based on the anonymity axiom. Such a perspective may provide a very incomplete picture given that the common objective of most studies investigating the pro-poorness of growth is to test whether specific policy reforms where beneficial to the initially poor or not. I suggest a new concept of pro-poor growth which removes the anonymity axiom, and, using an illustration based on data from Indonesia and Peru, I check whether the assessment of pro-poor growth is different when an anonymous and a non anonymous approach to pro-poor growth is used. I also suggest an original decomposition of poverty changes over time which links both concepts. The results show that the choice of the approach has a drastic impact on the interpretation of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]