Design and Implementation of the Indonesian Social Safety Net Programs: Evidence from the JPS Module in the 1999 SUSENAS

Designing and implementing social safety net programs in 1998 was a new experience for Indonesia. The severe social impacts of the crisis, which began in mid 1997, forced the government to act rapidly to safeguard real incomes and access to social services for the poor by instituting new and expanded programs.

The programs were created based on four strategies: ensuring the availability of food at affordable prices for the poor, supplementing purchasing power among poor households through employment creation, preserving access to critical social services, and sustaining local economic activity through regional block grant programs and extension of small scale credits. The findings of this study indicate that:

• Implementation of the programs was plagued by problems of targeting beneficiaries and delivering benefits to intended target groups;
• Programs suffered from the problem of undercoverage, with a large number of the poor not being reached;
• All the programs faced the problem of leakage, as a large proportion of program benefits went to the non-poor.

The paper concludes that these problems point to the difficulties in designing and implementing any program that provides cash or in-kind transfers in a developing country as large and diverse as Indonesia.