January 17, 2025
JAKARTA – Indonesia has recorded a historically low poverty rate, according to the latest survey conducted by Statistics Indonesia (BPS), but inequality has worsened slightly and remains particularly high in Jakarta.
BPS interim head Amalia Adininggar Widyasanti announced at a press conference on Wednesday that the poverty rate for September was at 8.57 percent, the first time the indicator has ever dropped below 9 percent.
“This is the lowest [the figure has ever been] in Indonesia since the poverty rate was first announced by BPS in 1960,” said Amalia.
Despite the improvement, the poverty rate still missed the target by quite a margin. The 2024 state budget had stipulated a goal of pushing the rate below 7.5 percent.
The survey is conducted twice a year, which means the figure for September is the latest available data.
The BPS report notes that 24.06 million people were living below the poverty line in September, down from 25.22 million in March when the rate was at 9.03 percent.
The poverty rate has been on a declining trend since September 2020, with the exception of September 2022 when it worsened marginally.
The decline continued even though the bar was raised in September as the poverty threshold was set at Rp 595.242 (US$36.34) of monthly expenditure, a 2.11 percent bump from the line set for the March survey.
Amalia revealed that 74.5 percent of what the poor spent went toward food.
All provinces in Kalimantan scored poverty rates below the national average, while all Papuan provinces had above-average rates.
Java Island, on the other hand, had it split 50-50, whereby the provinces in the west had poverty rates lower than the national average, while the provinces of Central Java and eastward had higher ones.
Amalia’s deck presented at the press conference detailed that only five provinces saw worsening poverty rates, namely Jambi, Bangka Belitung Islands, Central Kalimantan, Papua and South Papua.
Poverty disparity was apparent between urban and rural areas as 11.34 percent of the rural population lived below the poverty line versus 6.66 percent for the urbanites.
The greatest level of inequality was recorded in the province of Jakarta, the country’s most developed urban area, with a Gini coefficient of 0.431 in September, far above the national average of 0.381.
The gini coefficient is the predominant way of measuring inequality. With values between 0 and 1, a higher gini coefficient denotes a more unequal society.
The inequality survey is conducted twice a year, together with the poverty survey. Over the past 10 years, Jakarta’s Gini coefficient has usually come in above 0.4.
September saw inequality worsen in urban areas overall as the Gini coefficient crept up to 0.402 from the 0.399 recorded in March, while it inched down for rural areas from 0.306 in March to 0.308 in September.
Nationwide, inequality increased marginally as the Gini coefficient for September marked an uptick from the 0.379 recorded in March.
Bangka Belitung Islands, the province that registered worsening poverty, happened to score far better in inequality with a Gini coefficient of 0.235.