Events

Jointly organized by the Changing Family in Asia Cluster, and Indonesia Study Group, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Wei-Jun Jean Yeung, Asia Research Institute, Centre for Family and Population Research, and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Multiple initiatives are currently in place to expand the coverage of social protection and insurance in Indonesia. To improve the targeting of social spending, the National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction (TNP2K) launched an updated Unified Database, which contains information on 24 million of Indonesia’s poorest households. Meanwhile, around 167 million Indonesians have registered for the National Health Insurance scheme. Yet any consolidation of social protection and insurance programs in Indonesia necessitates an understanding of long-run trends in population dynamics. In particular, understanding the trends and drivers of family change is pivotal to mapping key issues and challenges in President Joko Widodo’s continued push towards welfare reform. In this seminar, I outline key features of contemporary family change in Indonesia: a modest decline in average household size; an uncertain trend in age at first marriage; fertility rates that hover above replacement level; an increasing tendency for women to marry down in education; more interethnic marriages; and an upturn in divorce since around 2006. I note the implications of family change on future trends in population and the workforce, and their associated longer-term challenges for current social protection initiatives.

This presentation is based on the latest Survey of Recent Developments, co-authored with Riatu Qibthiyyah in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00074918.2016.1211077

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ariane Utomo is a Research Fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy of the Australian National University, and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Changing Family in Asia Cluster of ARI-NUS. As a social demographer, her overarching research interest is to examine the relationship between the family and four dimensions of social change in contemporary Indonesia: globalization, economic development, demographic transition, and democratisation following the political Reforms in 1998. Her research and teaching activities are centred on how social change are reflected in attitudes to gender roles, school to work transition, women’s employment, changing marriage patterns, and the nature of social stratification in Indonesia. While at ARI, she will be working on a paper on ethnicity, migration, and marriage pairing patterns in Indonesia.

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