Coverage and Targetting in the Indonesian Social Safety Net Programmes

Abstract

I. Introduction The Government of Indonesia established a series of new and expanded programmes in early 1998 to mitigate the adverse social impacts of the economic crisis which began in mid-1997.(1) These programmes are widely known as the Social Safety Net or JPS programmes, an acronym of its Indonesian name, Jaring Pengaman Sosial. The programmes are intended to help protect the traditionally poor and the newly poor suffering from the crisis in three ways: ensuring the availability of food at affordable prices for the poor, supplementing purchasing power among poor households through employment creation, and preserving the access of the poor to critical social services such as health and education. Loans provided by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and bilateral donors (both directly through project support, and indirectly through programme loans which provide budget support) were the main sources of funding for the expansion of these various social safety net programmes. The disbursement of these funds accumulates into Indonesia's foreign national debt, which has increased rapidly since the crisis. Insofar as these funds contribute to raising the national debt, and would eventually have to be repaid, the need to ensure that these programmes are effective, efficient, and meet their stated objectives is further strengthened. This study is a preliminary evaluation of how effective the JPS programmes have been in reaching the poor and the needy. This is done by assessing firstly, coverage of the programmes among the poor, and secondly, the distribution of benefits of the programmes between the poor and the non-poor. The rest of the article is organized as follows. Section II briefly explains the source of the data for this study, and the method used in evaluating the effectiveness of the programmes. Section III discusses the main findings of this study, namely the coverage of the programmes and the effectiveness of their targetting (how much of the benefits are going to the poor). Section IV summarizes these findings and compares relative performances across districts. Finally, Section V concludes. II. Data and Methods Data: 100 Village Survey The data used in the analysis in this study were collected through the December 1998 round of the 100 Village Survey (Survei Seratus Desa or SSD) by the Statistics Indonesia (Badan Pusat Statistik or BPS). Data were collected from 12,000 households in December 1998. The survey, which was sponsored by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and carded out by BPS, covered 100 villages (desa) located in ten districts (kabupaten) and spread across eigth provinces.(2) The SSD sample, while quite large, was not designed to be statistically of the country. The 100 villages were geographically quite concentrated, located in only ten of the country's over 300 districts. The survey areas were chosen in 1994, based on a purposive sampling approach to capture various types of villages that were representative of various parts of the rural economy. Since the survey areas were chosen before the crisis, there would be no reason to suggest the sampling was influenced by the crisis. On the other hand, this survey was meant to focus on rural and relatively poor areas, so it is clearly not of the entire country. It is also difficult to determine how it is of the changes caused by the recent economic crisis.(3) For this reason we focus on the district-by-district analysis. As a consequence, it would be necessary to note that the conclusions reached are valid only for this sample. Methods: Programme Coverage and Targetting The social safety net programmes are intended to help the traditional poor -- and the newly poor suffering from the economic crisis -- in coping with the impacts of the crisis. It is hoped that through the implementation of various social safety net programmes, the worst effects of the crisis such as widespread hunger, poverty, unemployment, increased school drop-out rates, and malnutrition could be prevented, or at least reduced. …