Data from the Indonesian Statistics Office released on Monday showed that the poverty rate in Indonesia declined to 9.03% in March, compared to 9.36% in the same month last year.
Bloomberg News Agency indicated that the number of people living below the poverty line in Indonesia fell to 25.22 million people in March, compared to 25.9 million in the same month last year.
At the same time, there is still a wide difference between the urban poverty rate and the rural rate, although it has declined steadily since 2020. The urban poverty rate is 7.1% compared to 11.8% in the countryside. The number of poor people in rural Indonesia decreased over ten years by 3.06 million people, at an average of approximately 300,000 people annually.
Data from the Indonesian Bureau of Statistics issued last month showed that the inflation rate in Indonesia continued to decline during last May for the second month in a row, remaining within the central bank’s target range of between 1.5% and 3.5% annually.
The statistics office said the consumer price index rose 2.84% year-on-year in May after falling to 3% in April, while analysts had expected it to fall to 2.94% year-on-year. This comes as the Monetary Policy Committee of the Indonesian Central Bank focuses its attention on the recent decline in the rupiah against the dollar, which threatens to raise inflation through what is known as imported inflation.
In contrast, the statistics office indicated that core inflation, which excludes the most volatile goods such as food and energy, rose to 1.93% annually in May, compared to 1.82% in April, while the core inflation rate fell to 0.17% in the month, compared to 0.25% in the previous month.
