Rural Poverty and its Measurement - a Comparative-Study of Villages in Nusa-Penida, Bali

This paper compares the incidence of poverty in three neighbouring rural villages in Bali, two of which have experienced the innovation of seaweed-growing and have become market dependent, while the third remains a traditional cassava-com dependent village. Several alternative measures are used to compare the incidence of poverty in the villages, and these measures are discussed critically. All of them rate the incidence of poverty in the cassava-corn village to be very high, and much greater than in the seaweed-dependent villages. Aggregative or macroeconomic studies of poverty, even at the regional level, are liable to conceal or overlook such differences. An innovation, at least in the Indonesian context, is the application of subjective or respondent-dependent methods of assessing poverty. These, it is argued, can make a valuable contribution to poverty assessment and in this case their results accord most closely with those of an average per capita expenditure method based on rural Bali, the World Bank and the KFM objective methods. Economic development and growth such as has occurred in the seaweed villages has not increased the incidence of poverty; instead it appears to have reduced it, contrary to what might have been expected if Kuznets' theory or the Neo-Marxian theory were to apply