Poverty and Inequality in Indonesia

In this blog, I would like to respond to Arjun's blog about Indonesia. In his blog, he tells that in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, can become rich busy entrepreneurs who enjoy the rich city life. The blog also tells about Indonesia's development and also the inequality that happens in Indonesia. I agree with him about the inequality that happens between the rich and the poor. I would like to tell about the poverty and inequality that happens in Indonesia.

It is true that Indonesia has been developing as a developing country, even tough no as fast as other developing country like China and India and Indonesia also has made a remarkable progress in reducing poverty from the 1970s to 1990s. It is made by reducing growth and making large investment in health and education. In the 1998 economic crisis, poverty increased rapidly but nowadays, it had returned to the state before the crisis happened.

Even tough poverty in Indonesia is reduced, the inequality, however, is increasing. The gap between the income of rich people and poor people is getting larger. We can assume that the poverty in Indonesia is decreasing because the rich people income is getting larger or there is more rich people in Indonesia while the poor people's income and the number of poor people remain stable. There is still a lot of poor people who live below $2 a day.

We can also see that poverty in Indonesia has a regional face with remote areas being poorer, but the number of poor people in Java is much higher. This happen because of urbanization, there are a lot of youth trying to find job in Jakarta while most of them do not finish their education. The effect of this is youth unemployment has been rising  dramatically since the crisis.

Of course the government must do something to decrease the poverty and inequality. Several things that pop out of my mind is to reduce youth people and to achieve universal p primary education. By receiving education, a lot of youth can work in a higher wage rate than if they don't receive any education and therefore the poverty and inequality can be reduced.