Judul: Impact of fiscal capacity on regional economy and sectoral poverty in Indonesia: a policy simulation analysis
Abstrak: Poverty alleviation is an important agenda of national economic development in Indonesia. In order to accelerate the achievement of economic development goals, Indonesian government has been implementing fiscal decentralization policy since 2001. The policy was successful in increasing the rate of economic growth, but the income inequality became larger so that the poverty rate and the proportion of poor people in agricultural households has been increased. The implementation of fiscal decentralization policy in Indonesia which is focused on fully shifting expenditure assignment from central government to local government has lead to higher local expenditures as local governments strategies to increase their economic growth. However, the revenue assignments authority is limited so that fiscal capacity is low. As a result, the fiscal deficit is overcome by transfer General Allocation Fund (DAU) from the central government and also the local financial structures are mostly depend on DAU. Previous studies found the flypaper effect phenomenon as greater response of local governments in the use of budget sourced from DAU than those from original local revenue (PAD). Accordingly, if flypaper effect occurred in local expenditures with no great impact on poverty reduction then great role of DAU on local financial structure could not accelerating poverty alleviation. Therefore, fiscal capacity should be increased. The objective of this study is to analyze impact of fiscal capacity increasing on fiscal performance, sectoral economic performance, sectoral poverty rates, income inequality, and proportion of poor people in agricultural households by using a model of simultaneous equations system with province and regencies aggregate panel data in 23 provinces during 2005-2011 and Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) estimation method. The impact analysis of policy simulations is performed on historical period of 2006-2011 and forecast period of 2013-2015. Several important findings are: (1) fiscal capacity influences agriculture and infrastructure expenditures as important factors for agricultural growth and asphalt road infrastructure which further give high effects in reducing poverty rates, income inequality, and proportion of poor peopole in agricultural households; (2) fiscal capacity of local taxes is influenced by per capita Gross Domestic Regional Product (GDRP) and local private investment; (3) fiscal capacity of tax-revenue sharing is influenced by GDRP of non-agricultural sectors which are potentially increasing individual income tax (PPh) as the main source of tax revenue sharing; and (4) the alternative policies of the increasing of local agricultural and industrial expenditures larger than the increasing of trade expenditure, increasing of local portion from tax revenue sharing, and increasing of private direct investments mainly in agricultural provinces will increase fiscal capacity and give great impact on the improvement of fiscal performance, economic performance, and sectoral poverty which are indicated by higher fiscal autonomy rate, sectoral GDRP rate, and sectoral employment rate as well as lower sectoral headcount index, Gini Index, and proportion of poor people in agricultural household. Therefore, to achieve greater local economic growth, lower poverty rates, lower income inequality, and lower proportion of poor people in agricultural households as well as to achieve poverty targets on national development agenda RPJMN 2014 in the amount of 8-10 % and MDGs 2015 in the
Keyword: fiscal capacity, economic growth, income inequality, sectoral poverty