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View all search resultsPoverty rate hits another historic low as inequality narrows
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Low-income households on Jakarta riverbanks, such as these photographed on Jan. 17, 2011, are at high risk of flooding. (World Bank/ Farhana Asnap)
I
ndonesia has yet again recorded a drop in the poverty rate that signals a narrowing of inequality as measured through the Gini coefficient.
Statistics Indonesia (BPS) undersecretary for social statistics, Ateng Hartono, revealed in a press conference on Friday that poverty was logged at 8.47 percent in the newly published March survey, marking a 0.1 percentage point improvement from 8.57 percent registered in the September 2024 survey.
“In March 2025, the number of poor people in Indonesia was 23.85 million, down 0.2 million people compared to September 2024,” said Ateng.
The figure is the lowest ever measured since the statistics bureau began logging this metric in 1960.
A poor person is defined as anyone consuming goods and services valued at no more than Rp 609,160 (US$37.39) per month.
The drop in the number of poor comes even though the threshold for poverty was lifted by 2.34 percent from the figure of Rp 595,242 applied for the September survey.
The rate has been on a declining trend since 2020, rising only once in September 2022.
