Urban poor hardest hit by crisis: BPS

JAKARTA (JP): The country's urban poor, the group which has been hardest hit by the economic crisis, increased by 114 percent from 1996 to the end of 1998, the head of the official statistics body said.

Sugito Suwito of the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) announced on Friday that between February 1996 and December last year, the urban poor rose to 10.4 million.

Over the same period, the number of poor in rural areas increased by 108 percent to 16.6 million.

"This means that the increase (in poverty) was faster in urban areas than rural areas," Sugito said.

He said poverty hit the urban population harder than the rural population, despite higher absolute poverty figures in rural areas.

Sugito also said the total number of people living below the poverty line at the end of last year was estimated at 49.5 million. This represented a 120 percent increase over the estimated 22.5 million people living in poverty in February 1996.

The latest estimates were based on a joint survey conducted by BPS and the United Nations Development Program on the impact of the economic crisis.

BPS defined the poverty line for the period of the survey as a monthly income per capita of Rp 96,959 in urban areas, and Rp 72,780 in rural areas, Sugito said.

With an average size of 4.9 members in urban areas and 4.7 members in rural areas, each household needed a monthly minimum of Rp 475,000 in urban areas and Rp 342,000 in rural areas to meet basic needs, Sugito said.(anr)