Assessment of Indonesia’s poverty alleviation strategy: a chronic poverty approach

Countries and supranational institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF were united to establish a global agenda to eradicate poverty in the form of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) in the early of 2000’s. After several years of implementation of these goals and strategies, the World Bank reported that poverty level globally has significantly decreased to reach 9.5 percent in 2015, compared to 37.1 percent in 1990. At the national level, Indonesia which has committed to achieve the MDG as well as implemented poverty reduction strategies based on PRSP shows significant improvement in which its poverty rate has decreased by half from 24.2 percent in 1998 to 11.2 percent in 2015. This paper will briefly discuss poverty alleviation from the perspective of chronic poverty theory, and by examining Indonesia’s experience in poverty alleviation, this paper argues that the poverty alleviation strategy implemented by the government of Indonesia is effective.