Delphi: Nothing in Excess

If we look back to the human history, poor people always exist and become the main attention of the leader both from government and society. This attention is institutionalized in both country’s law and religion’ principles. Both country and religion assume that the poor should be helped. For example, in our UUD 45 there are statement about “fakir miskin dan anak terlantar” and in Islam, the rich have to help the poor as it state in the Qur’an text.

The best example of government intervention in poverty was Johnson’s “War on Poverty” during the year 60’s. His anti poverty program was judged as one of the success story in fighting poverty in US. This achievement gave him a better performance against critics of anti Vietnam War. In the Indonesian election both in 1999 and 2004, poverty become the “main commodity” in each candidate’s speech.  Even though after the election, the poverty also become the tools both for supporting and against the incumbent government.

In Indonesia, anti poverty program has also become one of most complicated program in the world in facing poverty since the economic crises 1998. It is shown that each department has had its own program for the sake of poverty. International organization also has had a role in the anti poverty program. Indonesian’s society with the NGO has taken some part of it. Some people both individuals and organization have taken advantages of the program againts poverty of course, which is not the target of the programs.The result of the whole program in reducing poverty has not been released yet. However, some of the number below could give a broad picture of the poverty in Indonesia.

Table 1. Head Count Index Indonesia

Source: Adapted from CBS (2005)

Both absolute and share of poor people have been decreased during the year 2000 to 2005. If it is traced into urban and rural poor, the trend also shows the same pattern. 

Table 2. Poverty Gap and Severity Index Indonesia

Source: Adapted from CBS (2005)

From the depth and the severity of the poverty, the decline trend of the indicator also been shown. It seems that from the absolute poverty, there are some systematic explanations about the decreasing of the absolute poverty since 2000. One of the explanations could be the economic growth; the other probably from some policies and actions in facing poverty.

Table 3. Gini Coefficient and Theil Index Indonesia

Source: Adapted from CBS (2005) 

The picture from absolute poverty above is not “as good as relative poverty”. It could be seen from the fluctuations of the both gini coefficient and theil index in 2002 and 2005. It is shown that in the year 2005, the relative poverty getting worse compare to the year 2002. The explanation of the fluctuation still have to be seen further.

The story above is based on the statistics, which is only explaining some part of poverty during the crises. Could we conclude that the poor take advantage of the poverty based on the statistics above? This question is an eternal and debatable question to be answered.

One of the “blessings of the poverty” in Indonesia during the crises is the increasing papers and theses about poverty in Indonesia, both in measurement and policies. Those papers have been produced by some institutions and individuals. As it well known, some individual papers and PhD theses are produced in the middle of the high poverty level in Indonesia. To make sure, please check the “Indonesia Poverty” in the google’s scholar and figure out your self of those papers and theses. Furthermore, an interesting discussion of the scholar’s advantageous on poverty [inequality] could be read in “Samwick vs Krugman in equality”, or if you want to more please read from Samwick’s blog and Angry Bear’s blog.

Facing poverty according to economic theory is simple: just let the quantity and price of labor, capital, land, and other resources to be distributed; as simple as that. The problem is how to distribute it? The distribution is the political side and not the economic problem according to the economist. Then it could be said that facing poverty is not the economic problem but political and (probably) ethic problem. 

It is shown above that the scholars and the leaders have taken advantages of poverty, while for the poor still unclear; while the economic theory could not stand alone in facing poverty; it needs some help from politics and ethics. For some reasons, sometimes poverty is just seen as the statistics which imply the poor of the statistics.

Depok, August 9, 2006.