Kathleen Beegle

Wages, employment and economic shocks: Evidence from Indonesia

Abstract. After over a quarter century of sustained economic growth, Indonesia was struck by a large and unanticipated crisis at the end of the 20th Century. Real GDP declined by about 12% in 1998. Using 13 years of annual labor force data in conjunction with two waves of a household panel, the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), this paper examines the impact of the crisis on labor market outcomes.

Indonesian Living Standards Before and After the Financial Crisis

The Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 was a serious blow to what had been a thirty-year period of rapid growth in East and Southeast Asia. This book uses the Indonesia Family Life Surveys (IFLS) from late 1997 and late 2000 to examine changes in many different dimensions of living standards of Indonesians from just before the start of the crisis to three years after. As of late 2000, almost three years after the economic crisis began, individuals in the IFLS data appear to have recovered in their living standards to the levels seen immediately prior to the crisis. This is the case for many dimensions of their standard of living: poverty, incomes, wages, child school enrolments, child and adult health status and health care utilization, and contraception use. Indonesian Living Standards: Before and After the Financial Crisis uses the rich data in IFLS to present a true to life overview of living conditions in rural and urban Indonesia. It is an important reference for policy-makers and those who work on a range of development and economic issues affecting Indonesia.