The COVID-19 pandemic has put immense pressure on the fiscal situation. Central revenues have decelerated while expenditures had to be increased to facilitate economic recovery. Local governments faced even harder challenges as intergovernmental transfers were reduced and room for mobilizing alternative finances was limited. This paper employs qualitative and secondary data analysis on local budget and fiscal capacities at the subnational level in Indonesia to find insights into the implications and responses of the provincial government in a decentralized economy during the pandemic. Provinces with a high dependence on intergovernmental transfer are struggling to adopt a countercyclical mitigative fiscal policy. However, provinces with high local own-source revenue have suffered the most during the crisis as low economic activity reduced tax revenues and indirectly lead to lower fiscal space. As fiscal policy is critical to containing the pandemic and facilitating recovery, this paper proposes several strategies toward a more sustainable fiscal policy for rebuilding local government capacity in the medium-to-long term in the aftermath of the crisis.

The empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (PWD) has recently attracted the attention of the Indonesian government. Several initiatives have been made to empower their life, especially the establishment of Act No. 8/2016 which enhances their right to inclusive economic activities. This study aims to map PWD in Indonesian labor market. Specifically, it analyzes the characteristics of employed and unemployed PWD. It explored Labor Force Survey (Sakernas), which began to concern on disability issue in 2016. The results show that PWD prevalence varies highly among provinces led by West Sumatera, East Nusa Tenggara, and South Sulawesi and that PWD has lower labor participation rate than that of PWOD. It may indicate the significant presence of discouraged workers among PWD.

The water supply and sanitation (WSS) sector requires large household investments and expenditure. Microfinance provides an alternative financing scheme to support in reaching universal access to WSS to improve public health and well-being. Using propensity score matching to Water.org's household survey data, combined with the Village Potential's village statistics, this study aims to evaluate the impact of microcredit devoted to improvements in water and sanitation facilities towards household welfare measured by the WSS Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) ladder status, income, and the share of health expenditure. Due to data availability limitations, the results indicated an associative relationship, as opposed to a causality relationship, between WSS microcredit participation and the respective outcomes. Participation in WSS microcredit was significantly associated with a higher JMP ladder for sanitation access but not with a JMP ladder for water access. Moreover, borrowers’ participation in WSS microcredit was associated with a significantly higher monthly income and a significantly lower proportion of health expenditure. Future evaluation studies of WSS microcredit should focus on improving data collection or conducting randomized control trials. For ensuring better practices, microfinance institutions (MFIs) should conduct stringent monitoring on fund usage to assure households benefit from the expected outcomes of WSS improvements.

This study aims to estimate the economic benefits of the Bogor Botanical Gardens (BBG) in terms of willingness to pay (WTP) and, using the estimation, to make a scenario of the entrance fee. Data were collected through a survey among 414 local visitors using the travel cost method (TCM) and choice modeling method (CM). The result from the TCM reveals that travel cost, gender, and education significantly affect the number of visits to the BBG. The value of consumer surplus amounts to IDR 582,072 (USD 40.90) and the total value of benefits obtained is IDR 728.8 billion (USD 51.21 million) per year. Meanwhile, the CM result shows that compensating surplus is estimated at IDR 19,704 (USD 1.38) and the total value of benefits is IDR 24.67 billion (USD 1.73 million) per year. The CM shows that the attributes of service cars as well as information and environmental educational tools and infrastructure have positive and significant values to the visitors. Thus, there is a potential to increase the entrance fee for tourists to become IDR 20,629 (USD 1.45) per visit. Through the increase in entrance fee, the BBG could generate a potential revenue of IDR 25.83 billion (USD 1.81 million) per year, which can improve the number of plant species, information and environmental educational tools and infrastructures, and service cars inside the BBG.