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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
Poverty and Social Protection in Indonesia
Robert Sparrow
To cite this article: Robert Sparrow (2013) Poverty and Social Protection in Indonesia, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 49:2, 244-245, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2013.772943
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.772943
Published online: 26 Jul 2013.
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244 Book reviews
discussions tend to stop short, however, of interrogating culture and religion in a land of many cultures across many islands, and the world’s largest Islamic nation. Perhaps they were not key determinants of economic outcomes, but their role is of interest nonetheless.
The authors conclude that Indonesia’s alternating growth regimes have
relected the government’s changing policies, which have swung from coercive
and protectionist, during periods of little to no growth, to market-based and free, during periods of high growth. This is not a novel conclusion. The book’s real appeal lies in the detail it provides of these propositions for the Indonesian case, its explanation and assessment of the political economy that determined the corresponding policy settings, and its attention to how the proceeds of growth were distributed in each major phase of the development story.
Glenn Withers
ANU
© 2013 Glenn Withers
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.809855
Joan Hardjono, Nuning Akhmadi and Sudarno Sumarto (eds) (2010)
Poverty and Social Protection in Indonesia, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, and SMERU Research
Institute, Jakarta, pp. xxxi + 272. Paper: $39.90.
Poverty and Social Protection in Indonesia looks back at the effect of the 1997–98
inancial crisis on poverty in Indonesia, and at the government’s subsequent
introduction of social-safety-net policies to protect the real incomes of Indonesian households and to preserve access to public services. On the one hand, it pre-sents a detailed account of poverty trends before, during and after the crisis; the channels through which the crisis affected households; and the implementation and targeting of the social-policy response. On the other, it provides a technical toolkit for measuring poverty and analysing the targeting performance of social-protection programs.
An interesting introductory chapter by Thee Kian Wie sets the context, by pro-viding an overview of poverty and growth in the three decades before the onset of the crisis. The remaining chapters (many of which have been previously pub-lished as articles by the SMERU Research Institute, in Jakarta) form two parts. Part one deals with poverty trends and with measures of poverty and vulnerability to poverty, while differentiating between transient and chronic poverty. These chap-ters describe the by now well-documented surge in the poverty rate during the crisis, and its gradual decline. They present, clearly and thoroughly, the methods and data required for measuring poverty; and they supply empirical solutions to problems such as how to measure changes in poverty during substantial shifts in relative food prices, as occurred during the crisis. This is especially borne out in chapter 5, by Lant H. Pritchett, Sudarno Sumarto and Asep Suryahadi, which tackles such problems with particular skill – it maps the evolution of poverty from 1996 to 2002 by introducing an innovative, time-consistent method of measuring
Book reviews 245
poverty over time, and by reconciling the different poverty estimates of previous studies. In addition to this macro view of poverty trends, part one also examines poverty dynamics at the micro level, illustrating how overall changes in poverty can be misleading if the underlying dynamics are ignored.
Part two discusses the various social-safety-net programs implemented by the Indonesian government in response to the crisis, such as the subsidised rice program; scholarships for primary- and secondary-school students; targeted user-fee waivers for public health care, through the revitalised health card; and employment creation schemes. It focuses mainly on the design and targeting of these programs, applying conventional, static methods of analysing the targeting
performance of the different programs, as well as methods of dynamic beneit
incidence analysis. Part two also discusses new methods of targeting social pro-grams, such as small-area poverty mapping and community-based monitoring systems.
Two policy issues stand out from the discussion, and both have partly moti-vated the government’s recent efforts to improve targeting and to reconsider the
design and role of social-protection policies. The irst concerns the considerable dificulties of targeting and reaching the poor during crises, which the authors
attribute to the government’s general lack of preparedness: a lack of data, few available policy instruments and inadequate targeting mechanisms. The second is more conceptual, addressing the objectives of social-safety-net programs. In particular, chapter 7, by Pritchett, Suryahadi and Sumarto, the most prominent contribution in part two, discusses the political economy of transfer programs, and considers the trade-off between social safety nets, in the form of providing transfers to the poorest, and safety ropes, which insure against shocks.
The book does, however, have some shortcomings; for one, it does not dis-cuss the effectiveness of social-safety-net programs in reaching their objectives. A review or a meta-analysis of the existing empirical evidence would have been a natural addition to the book. And, in what seems to be a missed opportunity, the analysis focuses solely on the 1997–98 crisis, even though its methods and data would also serve the developments and policies of the subsequent decade. The book’s main topics (monitoring poverty and scrutinising social-protection poli-cies) are as relevant now as they were then, and could be applied to recent
exam-ples such as the global inancial crisis and changes in Indonesia’s energy subsidies
and large-scale social-protection programs. This is partly acknowledged in the postscript and in one of the closing chapters.
Nevertheless, the book’s collection of well-written and complementary arti-cles is well worth reading, especially for those new to this literature. Its empirical analysis is comprehensive and technically sound, exploring a wealth of second-ary data sources. It offers an in-depth overview of poverty and social protection during the 1997–98 crisis in Indonesia, and it provides a technically advanced yet
accessible toolkit for poverty measurement and beneit incidence analysis.
Robert Sparrow
ANU
© 2013 Robert Sparrow
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.772943
