Jakarta. Indonesia’s central statistics agency (BPS) will release updated figures on poverty and unemployment this Friday, following a delay aimed at ensuring data accuracy and amid mounting scrutiny over discrepancies with World Bank estimates.

The release was initially scheduled for last week but was postponed after only six of the country’s 38 provinces had submitted finalized data. BPS said the decision was made to verify the reliability of its measurements and to avoid the perception of political interference.

“We will publish the updated data this Friday, after ensuring that our calculations are fully accurate,” BPS Chief Amalia Adininggar Widyasanti told reporters after a closed-door meeting with President Prabowo Subianto at the State Palace.

The upcoming release will be closely watched as the Prabowo administration navigates questions of data transparency and its economic credibility.

The latest available BPS data puts Indonesia’s absolute poverty rate at 8.57 percent as of September 2024, or around 24.06 million people. The unemployment rate stood at 5.32 percent as of August 2023. However, these official figures stand in stark contrast to the World Bank’s estimates.

In its April 2025 Macro Poverty Outlook, the World Bank reported that more than 60 percent of Indonesians -- equivalent to 171.8 million people -- lived below the poverty line in 2024, based on its global threshold of $6.85 per capita per day for upper-middle-income countries. Indonesia was classified as such in 2023, with a gross national income (GNI) per capita of $4,870.

The discrepancy stems from differences in methodology. While the World Bank applies internationally standardized thresholds based on purchasing power parity (PPP), BPS uses a Cost of Basic Needs (CBN) approach, which defines poverty based on the minimum required monthly expenditures for both food and essential non-food items such as housing, education, healthcare, and transportation.

As of September 2024, BPS set the national poverty line at Rp 595,242 per person per month. When measured at the household level -- based on an average size of 4.71 people -- the poverty threshold was approximately Rp 2.8 million per month. These figures vary widely across provinces: the average household poverty line was Rp 4.23 million in Jakarta, Rp 3.10 million in East Nusa Tenggara, and Rp 2.82 million in Lampung.

In response to the debate, the Indonesian government is preparing to revise its methodology for calculating the national poverty line to better reflect economic realities and international benchmarks.

However, BPS cautioned that applying the World Bank’s global poverty standards could result in a significantly higher poverty count due to this narrow margin.

President Prabowo said last weekend that both poverty and unemployment are on the decline. He has pledged to eliminate extreme poverty by 2026 and to halve the official poverty rate to 4.5 percent by the end of his term in 2029.

Parliament has urged BPS to ensure the integrity of its statistics, warning against the risk of “politicized data.”

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