Not Only China
Indonesia cut the share of people on under 3 dollars a day from 86 percent in 1984 to under 4 percent in 2025. The national poverty rate is still 8.1 percent.
Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Arriagada published a data insight on 13 October 2026 with a chart that is easy to misread as a miracle and easy to dismiss as China's. It is neither.
Our World in Data, drawing on the World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform, put Indonesia beside China. In 1984, 86 percent of Indonesians lived on less than 3 dollars a day. By 2025 that share was under 4 percent. The count of people fell from about 140 million to about 10 million. bne IntelliNews, on 15 October, citing the same series, printed the 2025 share as 3.7 percent. The OWID post itself said less than 4 percent. Same direction. A rounding difference we will not sand flat.
China, in the early 1980s, had more than 90 percent of its people under the same kind of line, and by the early 2020s had almost none. The authors' point was the lazy sentence: that the global drop is China, full stop. Indonesia is one of the countries that sentence erases. The two curves ran close until the mid-1990s. Then they separated. China fell faster. Indonesia still fell.
The line is the problem, and the authors say so. Three dollars a day is an extremely low international threshold. A World Bank Indonesia Poverty and Equity Brief, disclosed 9 October 2026 as the October brief, put the national poverty rate at 8.1 percent in March 2026, down 0.4 points on the year. The bottom 40 percent have had average real consumption growth above 4 percent a year since 2022, faster than the groups above them. That is progress on a line Indonesians actually use. It is not "under 4 percent."
Nothing was signed this week. No minister stood up. A chart moved, because a new year of the series was in the platform, and two researchers wrote the sentence the chart does not shout.
Key Facts & Figures
- Our World in Data insight, Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Arriagada, posted 13 October 2026
- International line: under 3 dollars a day, World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform
- Indonesia: 86 percent in 1984, under 4 percent in 2025. bne IntelliNews printed 3.7 percent
- Headcount: about 140 million people to about 10 million
- China over the same decades: about 91 percent to almost none. The global decline is not China's alone
- World Bank Indonesia Poverty and Equity Brief, October 2026: national poverty rate 8.1 percent in March 2026, down 0.4 points
- Bottom 40 percent: average real consumption growth above 4 percent a year since 2022
Why This Matters
Extreme poverty falling by an order of magnitude in one lifetime is the rare statistic that survives contact with a second source. The second source is the point. A national rate of 8.1 percent is still a country with a poor tenth, not a solved one. Readers who only hear 3.7 percent have been handed the lowest line on the page.
What We Don't Know Yet
- Why bne printed 3.7 and the OWID post said under 4. We treat them as the same series, not as a dispute to adjudicate.
- How much of the fall is growth, how much is the basket, how much is a survey change. The insight is a comparison, not a decomposition.
- What happens to the national rate in the next March figure. This brief is already a March 2026 number, published in October.
Sources
- Our World in Data, 13 October 2026: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/was-the-global-decline-of-extreme-poverty-only-due-to-china
- bne IntelliNews, 15 October 2026: https://www.intellinews.com/indonesia-cuts-extreme-poverty-rate-to-3-7-476437/
- World Bank Indonesia Poverty and Equity Brief, October 2026: https://documentos.bancomundial.org/es/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/099638104212531827