Women wearing protective face masks as a preventive measure against the coronavirus disease walk at a traditional market in Jakarta, Indonesia, May 5, 2020. REUTERS/Ajeng Dinar UlfianaJAKARTA: COVID-19 has set Indonesia's poverty eradication efforts back by a decade, its finance minister said on Wednesday , after regional elections were postponed amid concerns about the spread of the coronavirus.
Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati told parliament 2 million people had lost their jobs in the last six weeks in Southeast Asia's biggest economy."All of our achievement in reducing the poverty rate between 2011 to 2020 is reversed," Indrawati said. Indonesia's poverty rate was 12.36 per cent in 2011, with nearly 30 million people considered poor. The rate was 9.22 per cent in September last year, with 24.79 million people counted as poor.
Indonesia expects economic growth this year could slow to 2.3 per cent, down from 5.02 per cent last year, or under the government's worst-case scenario contract -0.4 per cent. Indrawati said authorities expected cases of the coronavirus to peak in late May and taper off in the following month, if the country was successful in avoiding a second wave.