Indef Prediction Of Indonesia's Poor Population Translates To 28.37 Million In 2021

Illustration. (Angga Nugraha / VOI)

JAKARTA - The COVID-19 pandemic has played an active role in increasing the poor population in Indonesia. The Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (Indef) predicts that the number of poor people in the country will increase in 2021.

Executive Director of Indef Tauhid Ahmad said the calculation of the poor in 2020 which was carried out at the beginning of the year did not reflect the true pandemic situation. In the next year the poor population will reach 10.5 percent or an increase of about 1 million with a total of 28.37 million.

"The assumption is that the national economic recovery program is not strong enough to restrain the growth rate of public consumption. Especially the poor and vulnerable to poverty," he said in a virtual discussion, Monday, November 23.

Furthermore, he said that unemployment also adds to the added effect of the new poor. These two factors will greatly affect the increase in the number of poor people in the next year as well as return to double digits.

"This is what I think, we are returning to the early period of the President's administration, that in the end there were more poor people than 10 percent," he said.

Tauhid said that the increase in unemployment could not be separated from the COVID-19 pandemic, where since before the pandemic Indef estimated an increase in unemployment from the previous 4.99 to 7.8 percent.

Meanwhile, there are an additional 3.6 million poor people and 10.4 million unemployed people that will occur in 2021.

"We estimate that there will be an increase in the new workforce that is not fully absorbed by approximately 2.5 million and 1.1 million as a result of COVID-19 which is still not absorbed until 2021," he explained.