Solutions to poverty and ecosystem degradation are often framed as conflicting. We ask whether Indonesia's national anti-poverty program, which transfers cash to hundreds of thousands of poor households, reduced deforestation as a side benefit. Although the program has no direct link to conservation, we estimate that it reduced tree cover loss in villages by 30% (95% confidence interval, 10 to 50%). About half of the avoided losses were in primary forests, and reductions were larger when participation density was higher. The economic value of the avoided carbon emissions alone compares favorably to program implementation costs. The program's environmental impact appears to be mediated through channels widely available in developing nations: consumption smoothing, whereby cash substitutes for deforestation as a form of insurance, and consumption substitution, whereby market-purchased goods substitute for deforestation-sourced goods. The results imply that anti-poverty programs targeted at the very poor can help achieve global environmental goals under certain conditions.

Conditional cash transfers to alleviate poverty also reduced deforestation in Indonesia.

We examine how income shocks affect the suicide rate in Indonesia. We use a difference-in-differences approach, exploiting the cash transfer's nationwide rollout, and corroborate the findings using...

Income Shocks and Suicides: Causal Evidence From Indonesia

In spite of the enormous economic progress and development witnessed in Indonesia in the last few decades, still more than 30% of Indonesian children under the age of five suffer from stunting, or low height for age. This concern is exacerbated by the fact that stunting remains more concentrated among the poorer households, leading to further intergenerational transmission of poverty and ill health. We examine recent trends in the evolution of the prevalence of childhood stunting and severe stunting, its socioeconomic inequality and the factors that appear to have contributed to these developments. Using the two most recent waves of the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), we study the changes in the prevalence of (severe) stunting between 2007 and 2014 for children aged 0-59 months and their socioeconomic-inequality using the Erreygers Concentration Index (EI) and its regression-based decomposition. We find a significant drop in the rate of severe stunting but not in stunting, as well as a significant reduction in the degree of absolute inequality of stunting. A decomposition analysis shows that household wealth, maternal education, institutional delivery, and availability of adequate sanitation contribute most to socioeconomic inequality in under-five stunting. Further analysis of the change in inequality over time indicates that the reduction in the association of wealth with stunting and a substantial improvement of health care access of the poor (as proxied by immunizations and institutional deliveries) play the most important role in narrowing the stunting gap between richer and poorer kids. General economic growth, poverty reduction, and implementation of pro-poor health and social programs during the studied period such as the expansion of health insurance coverage for the poor (Jamkesmas) and Conditional Cash Transfer program (Program Keluarga Harapan, PKH) are some plausible explanations of the observed result.

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Explaining the fall of socioeconomic inequality in childhood stunting in Indonesia.

Cooking that kills: Cleaner energy access, indoor air pollution, and health

Experimental long-term effects of early-childhood and school-age exposure to a conditional cash transfer program

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.

/pdf/cumulative-impacts-of-conditional-cash-transfer-programs-131zctle72.pdf

Cumulative Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia

Social engagement and the elderly in rural Indonesia

Data and Code for: Cumulative Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia

Grocery stores and modern stores are traders who are engaged in the retail business with the aim of making a profit. With the development of the era, it's not even just a grocery store, as now, modern stores, namely Indomaret and Alfamart, have been established on GKB Cluster, Gresik. Modern stores 

Nur Cahyadi

Papers

Cumulative Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia

Social engagement and the elderly in rural Indonesia

Cumulative Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia

Data and Code for: Cumulative Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia

Strategies To Increase Sales Volume In Dealing With The Modern Shop (Study on a Grocery Store at GKB Cluster– Gresik)