Vice President Jusuf Kalla praised the 'declining' of Indonesia's poverty rates. He even makes a 'projection' that the country's poverty rates will decrease further as the economic growth increases to seven per cent next year.

I'm very sure that the VP was referring to the BPS's press release, which says that poverty rates declined by 1.17 percentage points this year. However, the data did not mention the standard error of the difference in the poverty rates, which is about 2 per cent. Since the difference is smaller than the standard error, therefore this year's change in poverty rate is not statistically significant. As Rasyad Parinduri of Sarapan Ekonomi said a couple of months ago:

In that sense, the BPS's press release is rather misleading. It reports that poverty rate declines, but it does not tell us the standard error of the fall...

economy