Counting The Poor in Indonesia∗

A confusing aspect of the now rather large literature on trends in poverty in Indonesia in the New Order period is that virtually every study has used a different poverty line concept; indeed, even the World Bank appears to have used different poverty lines in different published studies and unpublished reports Unlike the government of Malaysia, for example, the Indonesian government has not chosen to promulgate a poverty line in its official planning documents, and successive Five Year Development Plans have had very little to say about poverty trends. However, the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) has in recent years put forward its own poverty line concept which has been used to estimate numbers in poverty in urban and rural areas, and these estimates have been published for some years in the annual Indikator Kesejahteraan Rakyat [Welfare Indicators]. Although the BPS estimates are now widely quoted in Indonesia, they have not won universal acceptance, and other authors continue to use other poverty line concepts and thus derive different conclusions regarding the extent of poverty in Indonesia, the regional distribution of the poor and trends in poverty over time.

One purpose of this paper is to review critically these different poverty concepts and to explain why they have produced different results. A second aim is to compare the Indonesian poverty line estimates with those from neighbouring ASEAN countries. Finally, some suggestions will be made on possible new initiatives in poverty research in Indonesia.

     

IMF Programs: Do They Work? Can They be Made to Work Better?

A central issue in the debate about a new international financial architecture has been whether programs of policy reform supported by the International Monetary Fund work. The Fund claims that “on balance” they do, because of their positive effect on the balance of payments. Others claim that programs are ineffective, and suggest that they should be discontinued. This paper reviews the econometric evidence dealing with the macroeconomic effects of IMF programs. It goes on to provide additional evidence and judges success against alternative criteria. Although the record is not good, the paper argues that it would be unwise for the Fund to cease lending and to abandon conditionality altogether. IMF programs need to be redesigned and refocused. The paper concludes by identifying a number of principles that should underpin reform.     

Policy Options for Expanding Rural Employment in Poor Areas

Through 17 years of painstaking efforts startingfrom 1986, China's improverished population has beenreduced from 110 million to less than 30 million. As a result,the overwhelming majority of the rural poor have the     

Wages and Teachers’ Hours of Work

This paper seeks to estimate the effect of teachers net marginal wages on their working hours, on the basis of a survey of Dutch teachers. The resulting uncompensated wage elasticity is significantly positive and has an average value of 0.2 for males and 0.4 for females. However, a general wage increase is a rather costly solution to teacher shortages. Alternatively, working full-time can be made attractive for part-time teachers by providing a premium for full-time teachers. This kind of premium provides part-time teachers with a stronger incentive to work full-time, as the negative income effect does not occur. Simulation results show that such a premium produces an effect that is almost seven times as large as a general wage increase.     

New Pills for Poor People? Empirical Evidence after GATT

The protection of pharmaceutical innovations is being dramatically extended as much of the developing world introduces patent protection for new drug products. This change in intellectual property rights may lead to more research on drugs to address developing country needs. We use new survey data from India, the results of interviews, and measures of research and development (R&D) constructed from a variety of statistical sources to determine trends in the allocation of research to products specific to developing country markets. There is some, although limited, evidence of an increase in the mid- to late 1980s which appears to have leveled off in the 1990s.The picture presented provides a “baseline” against which future patterns in research activity can be compared.     

How to Arouse the Poor Students＇ Interest in English Learning

As we all know, English plays an important role in the morden society. In the future, a person who knows nothing about English will be a new ＂blindman＂ o However, English learning is a complex process. Some poor students we often called can＇ t speak a little standard English. They always also make lots of mistakes in both homework and written English. This paper finds out that one of the most important factors influcening poor students is their low interest in English learning after an investigation in junior school. Then, this paper focuses on the importance of English learning interest, and analyzes the causes of the poor students＇ low interest in English learning. Lastly. the author suggests some ways of arousing poor English learners＇ interest in the teaching process, and believe that the poor students must be changed into good students as long as the English teachers arouse their interest in English learning.     

Giving to the Poor? Targeting of Food Aid in Rural Ethiopia

This study determines the factors underlying the allocations of food aid in Ethiopia. We focus on regional differences in targeting criteria, and targeting accuracy according to per capita income. Data are drawn from two linked rural household surveys in 1995–96. We find large differences in food aid allocations across regions that cannot be explained by observable regional characteristics such as per capita income and rainfall. These differences are consistent with speculation that food aid is being used by the Ethiopian government to transfer resources to favored regions. We also find wide variations in the criteria used to identify recipient households across regions. We identify measurable indicators that could be used by food aid authorities to improve targeting effectiveness in the future, both across and within regions. Finally, we present simulation results on targeting accuracy under various targeting strategies and discuss potential benefits and shortcomings of those strategies.     

Tax(i)ing the Poor? Commuting Costs in South African Cities

In this paper, I describe the monetary and time costs of commuting to work in South African cities, and how these have changed in the post‐Apartheid era. I interpret these results in light of a paper by Brueckner, who used a simple urban model to suggest that location and commuting patterns by race could change as a result of the repeal of Apartheid era legislation such as the Group Areas Act that made it impossible for black South Africans to live near the centre of cities. A key finding is that monetary and time costs of commuting in South African cities are high and have increased in the post‐Apartheid period. Journey times are much higher than the OECD country average and a sample of developing country cities. Part of the explanation for increasing average commute times is population growth in South African cities, which has been substantial. Both the population and number of commuters doubled between 1993 and 2013 in the six metropolitan municipalities (metros) analysed in this paper. Since commuting costs a substantial amount and generates negative externalities through congestion I also explore the financing of public transport.     

Taxes,Health Care Provision and Aggregate Hours of Work†

Abstract

A recent literature has studied the role of increases in labor taxes and transfers on the evolution of hours of work across OECD countries. Much of this literature studies this issue in a one sector model. This paper develops a two sector model in order to assess various features of health care financing on aggregate hours of work. A key result is that when health care is publicly financed but rationed, the distortion on aggregate hours of work is large and independent of the tax required to finance the system. Moreover, this effect increases over time as aggregate income increases.     

Japanese Company’s Cultural Shift for Gender Equality at Work

Abstract

The article provides an overview of Japanese Prime Minister Abe’s womanomics policy for gender equality (GD), and poses a question as to why despite a large amount of GD initiatives, Japan’s GD progress has been painfully slow. It then introduces an ethnography of the GD implementation by a Japanese multinational firm (2013–2017). It analyzes the firm’s pedagogical effort to correct the unconscious cultural bias to retool the existing habitus of managers and employees. The firm’s cultural strategies parallel its human resources (HR) reforms in its attempt to change organizational norms regarding how corporate men and women should work. Deploying theoretical perspectives of cultural neuroscience, semiotics, learning theory and interpretive anthropology, the author then identifies seven strategic foci for this firm’s cultural transformation, and terms this habitus-shifting program as MRS-PARC: M?=?magical messages and messengers; R?=?rites of passage and rituals; S?=?signs and symbols; P?=?rewarding and punishing task performances; A?=?clarifying alternatives and affordance; R?=?dealing with unexpected results, resistance and rear guards; and C?=?communication, complexity and continuity. Once MRS-PARC starts, corporate social drama and critical incidents lead the observer to the nexus of symbolic resistance and representation that in turn helps clarify how to modify the existing accommodation-and-redress mechanism for reform. MRS-PARC offers an empirically derived, action-oriented, process-based, analysis for those interested in moderating the people’s referential frameworks and cognitive/emotional orientations for organizational transformation.     

“Set a Sufficiently Ambitious Budget Target and Let the Automatic Stabilizers Work”. Will it Really Work in the European Monetary Union?

We examine the popular recipe in the title by means of an AD-LM-AS two-country model of the EMU, controlling for asymmetry in demand and supply shocks and in the monetary-policy transmission mechanism. Unless structural symmetry holds and symmetric shock occurs, national automatic stabilizers, even though supplemented with the common monetary policy, cannot deliver optimal stabilization in each economy. Inflation and output gaps are not closed and may be divergent in sign. Considering that a federal system of inter-regional insurance is lacking, the recipe under examination is too optimistic, while serious threat to EMU cohesion may arise. The econometric estimates we present show that existing national fiscal systems work very poorly as for the minimization, after shocks, of the dispersion of national incomes around the EMU average.     

Does Disclosure Regulation Work? Evidence from International IPO Markets*

This study examines whether IPO disclosure requirements mandated by countries’ securities laws are associated with variation in IPO underpricing in international IPO markets. Our empirical analysis uses a unique sample of 6,025 IPOs from 34 countries over the period from 1995 to 2002. We show for the first time that the stringency of disclosure requirements for IPO prospectuses is negatively associated with the extent of IPO underpricing, after controlling for various country‐ and firm‐level determinants of underpricing. Moreover, we find that the disclosure effect on IPO underpricing is moderated by the extent of a country’s capital market integration. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the view that increased disclosure regulation appears to reduce IPO underpricing and hence the cost of equity, and that institutional factors such as capital market integration play an important role in understanding the economic consequences of disclosure regulation in international IPO markets.     

How Did Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Become Heavily Indebted? Reviewing Two Decades of Debt Relief

The paradox of debt is that heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs) became heavily indebted after two decades of debt relief efforts. Average policies in HIPCs 1980–97 were worse than other less-developed countries (LDCs), controlling for income. Terms of trade and wars do not show a different trend in HIPCs than in non-HIPC LDCs. Financing HIPCs shifted away from private and bilateral nonconcessional sources toward International Development Assistance and other multilateral concessional financing––but this implicit form of debt relief also failed to reduce net present value debt. The record is not encouraging for the success of current debt relief efforts.     

Does Economic Growth Really Benefit the Poor? Income Distribution Dynamics and Pro-poor Growth in Indonesia

We explore the nexus between poverty, inequality, and economic growth in Indonesia between 2002 and 2012, using several pro-poor growth concepts and indices to determine whether growth in this period benefited the poor. Our regression-based decompositions of poverty into growth and redistribution components suggest that around 40% of inequality in total household expenditure in Indonesia was due to variations in expenditure by education characteristics that persisted after controlling for other factors. We find that economic growth in this period benefited households at the top of the expenditure distribution, and that a ‘trickle down’ effect saw the poor receive proportionately fewer benefits than the non-poor. If reducing poverty is one of the Indonesian government's principal objectives, then policies designed to spur growth must take into account the possible impacts of growth on inequality.     

Why Are There Rich and Poor Countries? Symmetry Breaking in the World Economy: A Note

This paper extends K. Matsuyama (1996, Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 10, 419–439) to allow for the presence of a fixed factor such as land. By assuming that agricultural production is more land-intensive than manufacturing production, we generalized Matsuyama's results on symmetry breaking in the world economy. That is, international trade by causing an agglomeration of economic activities in different countries of the world makes inevitable the coexistence of rich and poor. J. Japan. Int. Econ. June 1999, 13(2), pp. 140–149. Department of Economics, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 02155. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: F12 and O12.