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Ride-hailing services help slash Indonesia’s unemployment rate

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s unemployment rate has decreased significantly, according to the latest data from its Central Statistics Agency, thanks to tech companies like Uber and Go-Jek, which have poured billions of dollars into their ride-sharing platforms and attracted many Indonesians to join in as drivers — or partners, as the companies prefer to call them.

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s unemployment rate has decreased significantly, according to the latest data from its Central Statistics Agency, thanks to tech companies like Uber and Go-Jek, which have poured billions of dollars into their ride-sharing platforms and attracted many Indonesians to join in as drivers — or partners, as the companies prefer to call them.

BPS, the statistics agency, announced that 7.03 million Indonesians remain unemployed out of a total of 124.4 million in the workforce, according to its August data. That is equivalent to an unemployment rate of 5.61 per cent.

The figure is significantly lower than the 6.18 per cent recorded in August last year, when 7.56 million people were identified as unemployed out of a total of 122.38 million in the country’s workforce.

An employed person, according to the BPS, is someone older than 15 years who works at least one hour per week. Indonesia’s workforce is everyone above 15 years old.

The country’s population is estimated at about 250 million, including children.

“We’ve seen a surge in people who work as motorcycle-taxi drivers,” BPS head Suhariyanto said this week.

According to BPS data, about 5.6 million Indonesians now work in the transportation sector, up 500,000 from a year ago.

The BPS data did not distinguish between formal and informal workers.

Formal sector workers are those who earn a fixed or regular monthly income. Informal sector workers have irregular incomes.

The BPS also did not provide any breakdown on labour data in the transportation sector, but Mr Suhariyanto said the rise in employment rate in the sector correlates closely with the boom in business for app-based ride-sharing platforms such as Go-Jek, Grab and Uber.

Nevertheless, the bulk of Indonesia’s workforce still relies on jobs in the agricultural sector, which employs about 37.8 million Indonesians. The trade sector, which provides jobs to 26.69 million people, and business services, which keep 19.5 million employed, came in second and third as the most popular sectors for Indonesia’s workforce.

“We’ve also seen a surge of people finding new jobs in the trade sector, both online and offline,” Sukardi, director for population and employment at BPS, told reporters.

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