Community-driven development and inequality: The Role of the Indonesian National Empowerment Programme in Rural Poverty (PNPM Rural)

The dissertation presents an empirical study aimed at assessing the impact of
Community-Driven Development on inequality under the National Empowerment Programme called Program Nasional Pemberdayaan Masyarakat (PNPM)-Rural as an anti-poverty programme in Indonesia between 2010 and 2012. The author attempts to build a new empirical perspective on potential future findings of the direct and indirect impact of Community-Driven Development (CDD) on inequality using OLS Panel data regression. For a direct impact perspective, the empirical findings suggest that the programme implementation increased inequality within a national context. Meanwhile, focusing on the specific dominant rural population provinces, the programme affords to reduce inequality. The indirect potential impacts for the national context, the PNPM-Rural negatively associated with poor population growth and poverty gaps; whereby, both the poverty indicators are associated frequently with inequality trends.