With respect, you just can't translate incomes from IDR into USD, since purchasing power has always been incredibly high here. To say that the GDP per capita has fallen simply because of an exchange rate alteration misses the point, since people here deal solely in Rupiah.
Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) figures are much more indicative of the true situation. The Rupiah has fallen in value against the USD by 75% (from 2,500 to 10,000 - the figure of 12,000 is anomalous), but prices have less than doubled on what the government calls "the 9 essentials" (rice, flour, cooking oil, kerosene, etc). That means that PPP is down by less than 50% of the nominal USD income devaluation.
That said, times are very hard here, and rising unemployment and falling real household incomes are having a considerable effect. But unlike in India, people just don't starve to death in Indonesia, due to the extraordinary abundance of cheap food, so it is perhaps a little unfair to use USD average incomes as a measure of comparative well-being. |
