We use data envelopment analysis to measure the relative efficiency among Indonesia's provinces in using input to produce output over a 20-year period that includes the global economic crisis. We then employ the inequality decomposition technique of a Theil's second measure to explore the extent to which the efficiency factor contributes to interprovincial income inequality. Our efficiency analysis reveals that most Indonesian provinces improved their relative inefficiency considerably in both resource utilization and allocation. Moreover, the relative inefficiency became convergent across provinces for the period. However, several provinces with serious pure technical and scale inefficiencies still exist in 2010. The province of Yogyakarta critically underperformed in resource utilization, and Central Kalimantan and Papua operate at further suboptimum scales. The former needs to develop appropriate mechanisms to efficiently use its given resources, while the latter need to mitigate business-unfriendly regulations and deal with financial constraints. The inequality decomposition analysis shows that interprovincial convergence of inequality in overall technical inefficiency largely contributed to the reduction in income inequality. The convergence of inequality in resource utilization inefficiency had a greater impact on inequality convergence in overall technical inefficiency than in resource allocation inefficiency. In 2010, pure labor productivity became a substantial new factor in determining income inequality. Since this measure is affected by per capita physical and human capital and technology, the spatial allocation imbalance of these factors has become a new concern in Indonesia.

Susenas panel data, this study examines expenditure inequality from spatial perspectives in Indonesia, using three decomposition methods: (i) a conventional Theil index decomposition; (ii) an alternative Theil index decomposition proposed by Elbers et al. (2008); and (iii) the Blinder−Oaxaca decomposition. Our results show that overall inequality in per capita expenditure increases between 2008 and 2010, which coincides with a rising trend in the official Gini coefficient. The contribution of inequality within urban and rural areas to total inequality is larger than that of inequality between urban and rural areas. Looking within urban and rural areas, urban inequality is significantly higher than rural inequality. Java-Bali in particular records very high urban inequality. Overall, urban inequality increases, urban-rural inequality remains stable, rural inequality decreases, and inequality at the national level increases. Although urban-rural inequality has a relatively low share in overall inequality, the share is not small enough to ignore its impact. Furthermore, when using the alternative decomposition method, the contribution of urban-rural inequality increases substantially. The present study also found that educational differences appear to have played an important role in expenditure inequality within urban areas and between urban and rural areas.

This paper examines the effect of public investment on the regional economies of postwar Japan. It evaluates the effects of efficiency-verses-equity-oriented allocation policies by estimating the aggregate regional production function and calculating the marginal productivity of public capital for each region, using panel data covering the 47 prefectures over the period from 1955 to 2000. The empirical results show that public capital investment has alternated between an allocation policy based on efficiency and one that is based on equity, and, in fact, such investment was used as a policy tool for adjusting income distribution and accelerating economic growth. Numerical simulations are used to analyze the trade-offs between economic efficiency and inter-prefectural equity. The results indicate that in the case of income-elastic labor mobility, an efficiency-oriented allocation policy leads to larger aggregate gross domestic product by promoting both growth and equity simultaneously.

Introducing an employment variable with five levels of educational attainment per capita and employing inequality decomposition, this study addresses three questions. How does labour force vary by education and provinces? How does labour force utilization vary by education and provinces? What are the potential causes of differences? We find that the no‐primary‐education group is more endowed in less‐developed provinces and allocated most unequally among education groups across provinces, despite past universal primary education policies. The senior‐secondary‐education group with the largest labour share is a growing concern due to the lower employment rate and largest interprovincial inequality.

This paper studies the evolution of regional disparities in labor productivity, capital accumulation, and efficiency across Indonesian provinces over the 1990-2010 period.Through the lens of a nonlinear dynamic factor model, we first test the hypothesis that all provinces would eventually converge to a common steady-state path. We reject this hypothesis and find that the provincial dynamics of labor productivity are characterized by two convergence clubs.We next evaluate the dynamics of the proximate sources of labor productivity and find some mixed results. On the one hand, physical and human capital accumulation are characterized by three and two convergence clubs, respectively.On the other hand, efficiency is characterized by a unique convergence club. The paper concludes by suggesting that, based on the provincial composition of each club and the common low level of efficiency across Indonesia, considerable improvements in both capital accumulation and efficiency are still needed to reduce regional disparities and accelerate productivity growth.