Confusing statistics on the poor

Confusing statistics on the poor

By Peter Gardiner

JAKARTA (JP): At one time most people turned to the Central
Statistics Board (BPS) as the main source of statistical
information. Now there is competition. The National Family
Planning Coordinating Board (BKKBN) is seeking to establish
itself as a prime provider of information on social welfare in
Indonesia through its regular "census" of families throughout
virtually all parts of the country.

Competition is widely regarded as a good thing. Among others,
it creates a climate more conducive to improvement in quality and
adaptation to new ideas. However, in the game of statistics
there is the problem of conflicting estimates and methodologies
that administrators and bureaucrats (who generally want a single
conclusive statement) may find hard to handle.

As an example, BKKBN has recently released figures from its
latest round of data collection in January/February 2000 (JP
28/9/00). They report a total of 16.7 million poor families out
of a total of 47.5 million covered under their data collection
system. This can be compared to the latest BPS figures (for
August 1999) that estimated poverty at 37.5 million people or
just over 9 million households.

In fact there is no reason why these figures should agree as
the methodologies and definitions of poverty under these two
approaches are entirely different. BPS uses fairly detailed
information on household consumption and expenditure to define
monetary poverty lines conforming to a predefined basic standard
of food (2100 calories per capita per day) and non-food
consumption.

BKKBN uses an index based on a series of simple ("yes/no")
questions on conditions and attributes of families. Quite simply
these are measuring very different things even though they both
purport to be making more or less definitive statements on
poverty in Indonesia.

The question, of course, is the degree to which policy makers
and administrators dealing with poverty-related programs and
activities grasp these methodological and definitional
distinctions.

There is room for multiple players, but this does not
eliminate the need for at least some degree of technical
agreement on standards and sources for key indicators that drive
public policy.

If this is not achieved, it will only contribute to chaos
where different and often conflicting figures are driving
activities in different sectors, but where these same activities
are all (at least in theory) supposed to working toward a common
set of goals.

At this point in time, however, there is no consensus and BPS
may well be losing out in the political and financial battle for
the limited resources that are available. This is a matter of
concern among users who have come to regard BPS as the most
competent agency in government as far as collection and
processing of these statistics is concerned.

BPS is hardly blameless. True or not, there are views of BPS
as being arrogant and demanding very high prices for its data
collection efforts. The latter view has not been helped by the
financial tussles over the 2000 Census where the budget was first
cut and then partially reinstated after public pressure that this
would severely compromise the validity and value of the
undertaking.

However, with only a partial restoration of the budget, BPS
was still able to carry out the Census only slightly below what
was originally planned leaving one to ask if the original price
may have been too high.

On the other hand, professional competence and quality are
hardly free and here we must be concerned about the information
that BKKBN is collecting. In the same article announcing the
January/February results, BKKBN reported a budget of Rp 3 billion
for its next round of data collection.

They said this would involve some 1.5 million enumerators
(family planning cadre at village level) to cover -- using the
figure from the January/February round -- some 47-48 million
families. Simple division produces an average cost of around Rp
2000 per enumerator and around Rp 60-65 per family.

Even if all the money filtered down to this level, it would
imply that each interviewer would get around 25 US cents for
covering some 30-35 households in her local area.

As it is clear that only part of the budget would actually
flow down to the data collectors this clearly represents a high
level of exploitation -- mainly of women. And the State Minister
for Women's Empowerment whose portfolio includes being the chair
of BKKBN is supporting this! More important, even with
motivation on the part of these cadres, it is difficult to see
how quality can be preserved with so little return.

Given that, at the most basic level, poverty is an individual
or household phenomenon, the desire in recent years has been for
increasingly finer identification of the poor.

This has been exacerbated during the crisis by desires to
identify not only the existing poor, but also the newly poor for
social safety net interventions.

Through its surveys, BPS has focussed, understandably, on more
aggregate measurement -- at province and regency (kabupaten)
level, not at the level of villages and households that this
targeting mentality demands.

BKKBN stepped into this breach in the mid-1990s developing
their family welfare measurement system that they (and
increasingly local governments) have used to target various
poverty programs and crisis relief efforts.

Efforts are now being made to develop this into an even
broader population monitoring system that -- at least at the
present time -- is largely being engineered without the active
participation (or possibly even interest) of BPS.

The problem is that this is resulting in a dilution of
resources with BPS seemingly ending up on the short end of the
stick. One result is that the sample size for the Core
questionnaire of the 2001 National Social and Economic Survey
(Susenas) has been reduced from around 210,000 to 65,000
households.

As a result the ability to make estimates of key social
indicators down to kabupaten level that has been possible since
1993 will be lost -- and this precisely at a time when
decentralization will almost certainly generate and even greater
demand for reliable statistics at this level of disaggregation.

In all of this there appears to be a worrisome sense of
ambivalence in BPS. Are they willing to fight to convince their
potential customers and benefactors of what will be lost if their
capacities are further eroded?

Of course, where priorities should ultimately lie is a matter
of debate and requires a continuous dialogue among all
stakeholders. But if statistical priorities (including accepted
standards and methodologies) are not set, then it is the people
of Indonesia who could well be the losers.

In short, the way things are going could well lead to a
situation of large amounts of data, but none of which combines
both principles of coverage and credibility necessary to meet the
requirements of sound planning and monitoring of social change.

At worst, it may simply reinforce existing tendencies for
policy to be guided more by intuition than fact. While intuition
(or "common wisdom") may end up leading the country in the right
direction, the idea that policy and action should be guided by
sound and consistent information will have been compromised. And
that could be sad situation indeed.

The writer is a social researcher who has worked with poverty
issues and poverty statistics for several years.