Creating New Regions, Improving Regional Welfare Equality?

Aloysius Brata

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In concurrent with reformation and decentralization, number of sub-national administrative in Indonesia increase significantly. Existing regions has been splitting to create new regions. As the result, number of municipalities and districts in Indonesia in recent years are more than 450. The creation of new regions has been expected will increase citizens’ welfare in the regions and reduce regional inequality. However, indicative evidences shows negative impacts of this reform such as increase of inefficient administration cost of government, decrease capacity to deliver public services and increase potential for inter-group conflict. All of these indicative evidences will affect the welfare of citizens as seen on the human development indicators. Based on this background, the aim of this article is to analyze the relation of creation of new regions with the evolution of regional welfare inequality. The study employed human development index (HDI) at sub-national level (kota/kabupaten) as the indicator of welfare. The evolution of regional inequality of the HDI is analyzed by comparing coefficient of variation in the HDI from 1996 to 2005. This paper also estimated a preliminary empirical model to assess the impact of pemekaran on the within province inequality. The policy implication of this finding is that pemekaran should be controlled.

Keywords: new region; ‘pemekaran’; human development index; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 R11 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/12540/1/MPRA_paper_12540.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:12540

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().