Column 2: evidence · food share, line against life
Open data, followed all the way down to one person inside it.
Every piece here starts with a public dataset and ends with a story. The numbers can be checked: any figure set in mono opens its own evidence in a column to the right, so you never have to leave the sentence you are reading to find out whether it is true.
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Engel’s law: the poorer the household, the greater the share of spending that goes on food. The file carries food and non-food twice — once for what people actually spend, once inside the poverty line — so the same ratio can be taken of both.
| year | area | food share of the line | food share of actual spending | gap | n |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | PERKOTAAN | 70.8% | 45.1% | 25.6 pt | 34 |
| 2015 | PERDESAAN | 78.2% | 55.3% | 22.9 pt | 33 |
| 2016 | PERKOTAAN | 70.9% | 45.8% | 25.1 pt | 34 |
| 2016 | PERDESAAN | 78.6% | 55.0% | 23.6 pt | 33 |
| 2017 | PERKOTAAN | 71.4% | 47.9% | 23.5 pt | 34 |
| 2017 | PERDESAAN | 77.8% | 58.3% | 19.5 pt | 33 |
| 2018 | PERKOTAAN | 71.8% | 46.4% | 25.4 pt | 34 |
| 2018 | PERDESAAN | 77.3% | 55.0% | 22.3 pt | 33 |
| 2019 | PERKOTAAN | 72.5% | 46.4% | 26.1 pt | 34 |
| 2019 | PERDESAAN | 77.0% | 54.9% | 22.0 pt | 33 |
| 2020 | PERKOTAAN | 72.7% | 45.8% | 26.9 pt | 34 |
| 2020 | PERDESAAN | 76.9% | 54.6% | 22.3 pt | 33 |
| 2021 | PERKOTAAN | 72.7% | 46.7% | 26.0 pt | 34 |
| 2021 | PERDESAAN | 76.6% | 54.8% | 21.7 pt | 33 |
| 2022 | PERKOTAAN | 72.8% | 47.2% | 25.6 pt | 34 |
| 2022 | PERDESAAN | 76.1% | 56.5% | 19.6 pt | 33 |
The gap is stable at roughly 26 points for every year both series exist. A stable gap is a design, not a discrepancy: BPS builds the food component of the line from a fixed calorie basket, so its food share is stipulated rather than observed.
what it is good for
Two things. It gives a welfare ordering that needs no line at all — rural households spend 9.3 points more of their money on food than urban ones, in 2022, which is Engel’s law reporting that rural Indonesia is poorer without anybody choosing a threshold. And it puts a bound on how literally the poverty line should be read: it is a costing of a normative basket, not a description of the poor.