Jakarta, (24/5). Indonesia success in tackling income poverty in the past 30 years is undebatable. High economic performance has played an important role in reducing poverty. Now, with current 10.98 percent poverty incidence, the challenge for poverty reduction is coupled with slow economic growth and increasing inequality. The next task will be how to design effective poverty reduction strategy, how to identify where the challenges are and what is the driver of poverty that needs to be addressed.
As a big archipelago country with hundreds of different cultures spread across hundreds of municipalities, the government of Indonesia understands that poverty is dimensional and for effective poverty reduction, understanding the dimensionality of poverty is necessary.
In today’s development world, poverty is one of main issues to be tackled. Most countries’ poverty headcount indexes, which are mostly measured by monetary measurements, are compared to each other to measure performance of development process in each country. However, the broadly used monetary poverty measurement is argued by some critics due to its narrow measurement to make people categorized as poor and non-poor. Sen (1985) proposed that poverty is not only about something that people cannot buy/have, but it is about people’s capability to do and to be something. Since then, some other scholars argue that poverty should not only be about monetary value, but also about the needs and living quality of people. For example, Tsui (2002) argued that health and education, as basic human needs, should also be counted in poverty measurement and Bourguignon and Chakravarty (2003) argued that poverty should be explained by a multidimensional approach.
A single measurement of poverty may not be sufficient to measure whether one is categorized as poor or not. Absolute poverty line, which is mostly used by many countries to measure poverty, may categorized someone as non-poor even if a person’s per capita income is only a penny higher than poverty line. As a result, with similar poor condition between person below poverty line, the person mentioned before is categorized as non-poor, and may not get any benefits which he/she should get due to his/her condition. Thus, a poverty measurement, which takes people’s basic needs into account, is needed to measure ‘real poverty’ condition of people. Based on these arguments on monetary poverty measurements, Alkire and Foster (2007) proposed a multidimensional poverty measurement using FGT’s (Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke) class of one-dimensional poverty measurements.
With the current challenges in poverty and inequality, exploring multidimensional poverty index for Indonesia is very timely and necessary. MPI is not build with the intention to change the expenditure based poverty index, in fact MPI can be used to complement the expenditure based poverty index so that policy maker may better target resources and design effective policies.
Workshop on MPI
Session 1, Speakers:
Presentation 1:
• Dimensional Poverty Measurement: What and how it differs from expenditure based poverty index?
• How useful is dimensional poverty: From planning to evaluation.
Speaker: Dr. Sabine Alkire, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI)
Discussants:
1. Dr. MO. Royani, MSi., Ministry of Social Affairs
2. Harmawanti Marhaeni, M.Sc., Statistics Indonesia
3. Dr. Vivi Yulaswati, National Planning Board/Bappenas
Moderator: Economist UNDP
Session 2, Speakers:
Presentation 1:
• Indonesia MPI: A policy analysis
Speaker: Dr. Teguh Dartanto, Universitas Indonesia
• Multidimensional Poverty Index Indonesia: Some drawbacks and how to move forward
Dr. Sabine Alkire, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI)
Discussants:
1. Widjajanti Isdijoso, SMERU Research Institute
2. Dr. Sudarno Sumarto, SMERU Research Institute
3. Ah Maftuchan , Perkumpulan Prakarsa
Moderator: UNDP Poverty Reduction Advisor