Indonesia has made improving the access to health workers, especially in rural areas, and improving the quality of health providers key priority areas of its next five-year development plan. Significant steps and policy changes were taken in the past to improve the distribution of the health force, but few studies have been undertaken to measure the actual impact of these policies and programs. This study begins the process of reviewing the impacts of the past policies and policy changes. It links the changes in supply and quality of health workers to past health work force policies but also to changes in financing and civil service reforms policies. In addition, important aspects of health professional education and changes in demand for services are reviewed.

BAB 1 Alat Analisis dan Metode Metode Eksperimen Lab-in-the-Field dalam Ekonomika Mikro Terapan Muhammad Ryan Sanjaya Bias-Corrected Estimasi OLS dalam Analisis Spasial: Kombinasi Concentrated Grid-Search dan Evaluasi Model Berbasis AIC Gigih Fitrianto; Bab 2 Kemiskinan Pertumbuhan, Ketimpangan, dan Kemiskinan di Indonesia: Analisis Metode Dekomposisi Kemiskinan 2011-2017 Elan Satriawan & Cahyo Nugroho Efek Gempa Bumi pada Permintaan Pangan Rumah Tangga: Pendekatan Linear Approximate Almost Ideal Demand System Eny Sulistyaningrum Kenaikan Harga Pangan, Kesejahteraan, dan Kemiskinan: Analisis Data Survei Aspek Kehidupan Rumah Tangga Indonesia Elan Satriawan & Wulan Wiyat Wuri; Bab 3 Kesehatan Partisipasi dalam Organisasi Masyarakat dan Utilisasi Pelayanan Kesehatan Ibu Hamil di Indonesia Timur Heni Wahyuni; Bab 4 Keuangan Determinan Inklusi Keuangan pada Bank Umum Syariah di Indonesia Diyah Putriani, Prastowo, & Amelia Salsabila

Buku Pemikiran 100 Ekonom Indonesia Edisi Kedua merupakan kumpulan tulisan para ekonom Indonesia yang diharapkan mampu memberikan kontribusi substantif, setidaknya dalam enam subjek penting dan beragam perspektif. Kontribusi substantif tersebut dibagi dalam enam bagian besar, yaitu (1) sinergi stimulus fiskal dan percepatan infrastruktur, (2) inklusi keuangan, (3) usaha mikro, kecil dan menengah (UMKM), industri dan persaingan usaha, (4) sumber daya manusia, daya saing dan kemandirian ekonomi, (5) pembangunan pertanian pedesaan, dan daerah tertinggal dan (6) tantangan mewujudkan kesejahteraan. Bagian I dari buku Pemikiran 100 ekonom ini membahas sinergi stimulus fiskal dan percepatan infrastruktur, dengan argumen bahwa pengeluaran ekstra besar untuk percepatan pembangunan infrastruktur masih senantiasa dibayangi sekian macam risiko fiskal. Bagian II membedah inklusi keuangan, karena para ekonom amat peduli pada tingkat suku bunga perbankan di Indonesia yang tercatat amat tinggi, yang tentu amat mempengaruhi akses keuangan, terutama bagi kelompok usaha kecil dan menengah. Bagian III membahas UMKM, industri dan persaingan usaha dengan berbagai spektrum. Hampir semua ekonom sepakat tentang potensi besar UMKM sebagai basis ekonomi, termasuk revitalisasi koperasi sebagai amanat konstitusi untuk memajukan kesejahteraan umum, tantangan UMKM era disrupsi teknologi dan sebagainya. Bagian IV membahas sumber daya manusia (SDM), daya saing dan kemandirian ekonomi, yang juga mendapat perhatian Pemerintah, setidaknya telah tercantum dalam rancangan teknokratik Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah (RPJM) 2020-2024. Bagian V menyoroti secara khusus pembangunan pertanian perdesaan, dan daerah tertinggal, yang selama beberapa tahun terakhir masih mengandalkan intervensi negara melalui APBN dan terlalu fokus pada program swasembada pajale (padi-jagung-kedelai). Bagian VI atau terakhir membahas beberapa perspektif penting dan tantangan strategis dalam mewujudkan kesejahteraan umum. Para ekonom cukup prihatin terhadap lambannya penurunan kemiskinan dan ketimpangan pendapatan, walaupun kinerja pertumbuhan ekonomi masih di atas 5 persen per tahun.

This paper exploits heterogeneity in program exposure to evaluate the effectiveness of a supplementary feeding program implemented in the wake of the 1997-1998 economic crises in Indonesia. The explicit aim of the program was to protect the nutritional status of infants and young children from adverse effects of the crisis. The use of heterogeneity in program exposure has several advantages for identifying the impact of the program. First, the analysis avoids the strong assumption that all targeted children experienced homogenous exposure to the program, and facilitates identification in a setting in which nearly all communities experienced some exposure. Second, by exploiting child age and program eligibility rules, the paper estimates models with community fixed effects and thus avoid bias introduced as a result of endogenous program placement. The analysis finds that the program improved the nutritional status of children 12 to 24 months of age at the time of the survey in 2000, and helped to avoid problems of severe malnutrition among young children.

Governments seeking to provide food assistance have a choice between providing in-kind food directly to beneficiaries, or providing vouchers that can be used to purchase food on the market. To understand the differences between these policies, the Government of Indonesia randomly phased in the transition from in-kind delivery of subsidized rice to approximately equivalent vouchers usable to buy rice and eggs across 105 districts comprising over 3.4 million beneficiary households. We find the transition led to substantial changes in the allocation of aid in practice. The vouchers provided concentrated assistance to targeted households, who received 45 percent more assistance in voucher areas than in in-kind districts. As a result, for households in the bottom 15 percent at baseline, poverty fell by 20 percent. Vouchers also allowed households to purchase higher-quality rice, and led to increased consumption of egg-based proteins. We find vouchers have little effect on aggregate rice prices, although we observe modest price increases in remote villages. Overall leakage from the program was not affected, but the administrative costs of benefits delivery substantially fell. In short, the results suggest that the change from in-kind food aid to vouchers led to substantial impacts on poverty through the way it changed how programs were implemented on the ground.

Governments seeking to provide food assistance have a choice between providing in-kind food directly to beneficiaries, or providing vouchers that can be used to purchase food on the market. To understand the differences between these policies, the Government of Indonesia randomly phased in the transition from in-kind delivery of subsidized rice to approximately equivalent vouchers usable to buy rice and eggs across 105 districts comprising over 3.4 million beneficiary households. We find the transition led to substantial changes in the allocation of aid in practice. The vouchers provided concentrated assistance to targeted households, who received 45 percent more assistance in voucher areas than in in-kind districts. As a result, for households in the bottom 15 percent at baseline, poverty fell by 20 percent. Vouchers also allowed households to purchase higher-quality rice, and led to increased consumption of egg-based proteins. We find vouchers have little effect on aggregate rice prices, although we observe modest price increases in remote villages. Overall leakage from the program was not affected, but the administrative costs of benefits delivery substantially fell. In short, the results suggest that the change from in-kind food aid to vouchers led to substantial impacts on poverty through the way it changed how programs were implemented on the ground.

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have spread worldwide, and are designed to promote comprehensive human capital investments in children, starting from encouraging pre-natal and maternal care and early childhood health interventions and continuing through incentivizing school attendance. Yet evaluating these claims over more than a few years is hard, as most CCT experiments extend the program to the control group after a short experimental period. This paper experimentally estimates the impacts of Indonesia's cash transfer program (PKH) six years after the program launched, using data from about 14,000 households in 360 sub-districts across Indonesia, taking advantage of the fact that treatment and control locations remained largely intact throughout the period. We find that PKH continues to have large static incentive effects on many of the targeted indicators, increasing usage of trained health professionals for childbirth dramatically and halving the share of children age 7-15 who are not enrolled in school. Wage labor for 13-15 year olds was reduced by at least one-third. We also begin to observe impacts on outcomes that may require cumulative investments: for example, six years later, we observe large reductions in stunting and some evidence of increased high school completion rates. The results suggest that CCT investments can have substantial effects on the accumulation of human capital, and that these effects can persist even when programs are operating at large-scale without researcher intervention.

We study the determinants of hemoglobin concentration in women throughout their life cycle and ask whether anemia during adolescence persists into adulthood. Using a panel of individuals from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), we find that although about 30% of our sample was anemic during a given survey wave, 63% experienced anemia at least once over the four survey waves, suggesting a high burden of anemia among Indonesian women. Furthermore, the high prevalence of anemia is not limited to poor women but is also observed in the wealthier segments of the population. Using a dynamic panel framework, we find a significant relationship between current hemoglobin concentration and its measurement in the preceding survey wave, suggesting some persistence of anemia status across survey waves. However, a small autoregressive coefficient suggests that hemoglobin concentration and the likelihood of anemia converge across women over time. We find a few variables that are significant determinants of hemoglobin concentration. Among them, household socioeconomic status and wages of women compared with men in the community are positively associated with hemoglobin concentration.