Urban Poverty in Indonesia: Trends, Issues, and Policies

Urban poverty will be among the great development challenges to face Indonesia in the 1990s and beyond. One explanation for this is that urbanization will likely accelerate in the future, while efforts to deal with it will remain inadequate. This inadequacy will occur not only because of the lack of development funds to provide goods and services to meet basic urban needs, but also because of the government’s limitations to create urban employment opportunities. In addition, it is widely felt that policies to meet rapid urbanization will tend to benefit the nonpoor more than the urban poor, as in the past…