The Evolution of Poverty During the Crisis in Indonesia

The economic crisis caused a clear deterioration in the welfare of the Indonesian people. in this paper, we examine the appropriate method to compare the change in poverty rates over time. we then piece together a consistent series of estimates of poverty rates during the crisis from various sources, covering a period from february 1996 to february 2002. the reconciliation of these various estimates paints a very reasonable picture and neatly tracks events. the poverty rate increased from the lowest point of around 15 percent at the onset of the crisis in the mid of 1997 to the highest point of around 33 percent nearing the end of 1998. this maximum increase in poverty rate during the crisis of 18 percentage points implies that around 36 million additional people were pushed into absolute poverty due to the crisis. after the peak point, the poverty rate started to decline again and reached the pre-crisis level of around 15 percents at the end of 1999, implying the lost time in poverty reduction due to the crisis was around two and a half years. however, the poverty rate after this point appears to have fluctuated. during 2001 until early 2002, poverty was on the rise again. keywords: poverty, crisis, welfare, measurement, Indonesi

Quantifying Vulnerability to Poverty: a Proposed Measure, with Application to Indonesia

Vulnerability is an important aspect of households' experience of poverty. many households, while not currently "in poverty", recognize that they are vulnerable to events that could easily push them into poverty-a bad harvest, a lost job, an unexpected expense, an illness, an economic downturn. most operational measures define poverty as some function of the shortfall of current consumption expenditures from a poverty line, and hence measure only poverty at a single point in time. we propose a simple expansion of these measures to quantify "vulnerability." we define vulnerability as a probability, the risk a household will experience at least one episode of poverty in the near future. a household is defined to be vulnerable if it has 50-50 odds or worse of falling into poverty. using these definitions we calculate the "vulnerability to poverty line" (vpl) as the level of expenditures below which a household is vulnerable to poverty. this vpl allows the calculation of the direct analogue of the "headcount poverty rate," which is the proportion of households vulnerable to poverty. we implement this approach using panel data from Indonesia. we first show that if poverty line is set so that the headcount poverty rate is 20 percent, the proportion of households that are vulnerable to poverty is 50 percent. so in addition to the 20 percent that are currently poor, hence are vulnerable, an additional 30 percent of the population is at risk of poverty. second, we illustrate the usefulness of this approach by examining differences in vulnerability between households by level of education, by land holding status and by gender of the household head. the conclusion speculates on the policy implications of these high levels of vulnerability. * we would like to thank peter rosner, martin ravallion, and menno pradhan for their valuable comments and suggestions. we are very grateful to unicef and bps for providing access to the data

Little Village Playhouse: The Challenges of Social Entrepreneurship

Copyright 2013, Pace University. This case was developed for class discussion, and is not intended as an endorsement, source of primary data, or illustration of effective or ineffective management. Descriptions involving student participants are stylized depictions, and do not refer to any individual participant. The authors thank the Wilson Center for Social Entrepreneurship for financial support, and the principals of Little Village Playhouse for their cooperation and support

The Physics of Hard Spheres Experiment on MSL-1: Required Measurements and Instrument Performance

The Physics of HArd Spheres Experiment (PHaSE), one of NASA Lewis Research Center's first major light scattering experiments for microgravity research on complex fluids, flew on board the Space Shuttle's Microgravity Science Laboratory (MSL-1) in 1997. Using colloidal systems of various concentrations of micron-sized plastic spheres in a refractive index-matching fluid as test samples, illuminated by laser light during and after crystallization, investigations were conducted to measure the nucleation and growth rate of colloidal crystals as well as the structure, rheology, and dynamics of the equilibrium crystal. Together, these measurements support an enhanced understanding of the nature of the liquid-to-solid transition. Achievement of the science objectives required an accurate experimental determination of eight fundamental properties for the hard sphere colloidal samples. The instrument design met almost all of the original measurement requirements, but with compromise on the number of samples on which data were taken. The instrument performs 2-D Bragg and low angle scattering from 0.4 deg. to 60 deg., dynamic and single-channel static scattering from 10 deg. to 170 deg., rheology using fiber optics, and white light imaging of the sample. As a result, PHaSE provided a timely microgravity demonstration of critical light scattering measurement techniques and hardware concepts, while generating data already showing promise of interesting new scientific findings in the field of condensed matter physics