Poverty And Unemployment

7 Pages 1633 Words

“Poverty is produced by circumstances, not individuals.” (Fincher and Wulff, 1998)

The expansion of international poverty and unemployment in the world over the last few decades has been associated with the onset of rapid growth of the capitalist market. Economic crisis or boom assists in the growth of the so-called ‘poverty sector’(James, 2002), leading to unemployment and social unrest. When comparing the poverty and unemployment within countries such as Australia and Indonesia, several distinctions can be made of the various extent of these problems. For one, Australia is classified as a ‘First World’ country, whilst Indonesia experiences the poverty of the ‘South’ or the ‘Third World’. Consequently, this produces various measurements of poverty in each of these countries and also indicates the definition of poverty in Australia and Indonesia. Other differences between the situations of poverty with these neighbours are that there are various classes, education levels and different primary industries. In wake of Suharto’s regime and the economic crisis in Indonesia, the country also faces challenges protecting workers and dealing with international debt, problems that Australia seems to have conquered.

Following the economic crisis, Indonesia experienced many social impacts, however, these have been “neither been uniform nor homogenous across the archipelago” (Maxwell, 1999). The common measurement of poverty is from the Central Bureau of Statistics, that poverty has almost doubled from its pre-crisis level of 11 per cent to around 20 per cent (Maxwell, 1999). Despite this, some sources indicate that approximately 100 million Indonesians would sink below the poverty line, which includes almost 50 per cent of the population (Pettifor, 2002). Within Australia poverty is seen at 13 per cent, with an estimated total of 2.4 million Australian’s now living in poverty (ACOSS, 2001). Even though...