The country’s gross national income (GNI) per capita, which measures the sum of money a nation earns divided by its population, reached US$4,580 last year. It increased by 9.8 percent from the previous year, according to the World Bank database.

Countries earning over $4,466 in GNI per capita receive the upper-middle-income status from the World Bank. Every year, the World Bank updates its classification, which it says follows a similar methodology to its operational lending policy.

Indonesia sat as an upper-middle-income country based on its GNI per capita in 2019, but was relegated back to lower-middle status following the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the economy.

“Subsequently, the government has committed to maintaining the economic recovery quality,” Febrio Kacaribu, head of the Finance Ministry’s Fiscal Policy Agency (BKF), said in a statement on Monday. 

Febrio attributed the improvement to the government’s success in bringing poverty back down to single digits in 2022 after it rose to above 10 percent the previous year, as well as the declining rate of unemployment, as the economy approaches a return to pre-pandemic levels of employment.

During the pandemic, Indonesia saw its first annual economic contraction since 1998 as GDP dropped 2.07 percent in 2020 amid battered consumer spending and private investment.

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