Poverty in Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

is a widespread issue though in recent years the official numbers show a declining trend. Due to the dense rural nature of parts of the Java, Bali, Lombok, and parts of Sumatra, poverty can be classified into rural and urban poverty. Urban poverty is prevalent in not only in Jabotabek

Jabotabek

Jabotabek is an officially recognized definition and term given to the urban region surrounding Jakarta, Indonesia in 2000, officially including five municipalities and three regencies...

, but also in Medan

Medan

- Demography :The city is Indonesia's fourth most populous after Jakarta, Surabaya, and Bandung, and Indonesia's largest city outside of Java island. Much of the population lies outside its city limits, especially in Deli Serdang....

 and Surabaya

Surabaya

Surabaya is Indonesia's second-largest city with a population of over 2.7 million , and the capital of the province of East Java...

. As a sprawling archipelago, poverty characteristics and implications vary widely from island to island and culture to culture. There a multitude of mutually unintelligible languages in Indonesia

Languages of Indonesia

More than 700 living languages are spoken in Indonesia. Most belong to the Austronesian language family, with a few Papuan languages also spoken. The official language is Indonesian , a modified version of Malay, which is used in commerce, administration, education and the media, but most...

. Papua has serious poverty issues of its own due to economic, cultural, linguistic and physical isolation which set it apart from the rest of Indonesia.

Figures

In February 1999, as much as 47.97 million people were classified as poor, representing 23.43% of the nation's population. However, this figure must take into account the slide of the rupiah in the Asian financial crisis. By July 2005, that number had been reduced to 35.10 million, representing 15.97% of the total population. Latest available figures, March 2007, show that 37.17 million people are under the poverty line representing 16.58% of the entire population. While the total number of people officially classified as poor in Indonesia is less than that of the officially classified poor in the United States

Poverty in the United States

Poverty is defined as the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions. According to the U.S. Census Bureau data released Tuesday September 13th, 2011, the nation's poverty rate rose to 15.1% in 2010, up from 14.3% in 2009 and to its highest level...

with 39.1 million, the measures are calculated differently and problems with methodology exist in both nations.