Putu Angga Widyastaman

Food insecurity is essential since its prevalence may hinder an individual or an economy from developing. The issue still lacks attention in Indonesia, as reflected in the lagging efforts to reduce food insecurity. Meanwhile, several previous studies have found that increasing internet access may decrease food insecurity. Using a sample of 140,892 agricultural households from the National Socioeconomic Survey data, this study uses quantitative measures to evaluate the effects of internet use on the food insecurity of Indonesian agricultural households. The present study uses raw and Rasch scores to measure food insecurity, based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale question items. To estimate the effect of internet use on food insecurity, this study uses the two-stage least square estimation with topography as the instrumental variable, which is important due to the existence of an endogeneity problem. The present research also evaluates the possible mediating effect between internet use and food insecurity through households’ per capita income. Findings reveal that internet use negatively affects agricultural households’ food insecurity. This study also demonstrates that internet use can lower food insecurity in agricultural households through the mediating effects of income. From these results, policy implications are as follows; prioritization of internet infrastructure in remote areas, dissemination of information to enhance the production of agricultural households, and efforts to increase internet use among agricultural households.

Rising crime victimization rate in Indonesia shows that crime is still a serious problem in the country. This study aims to identify the relationship between economic inequality and crime rate in Indonesia. It used the decomposed Theil indices, as the measure of inequality based on national household survey panel data, to disentangle the effect of economic inequality into within-district/city and between-district/city economic inequality components. This choice of inequality measure is due to the fact that most of the previous studies regarding economic inequality and crime overlooked the disentanglement between economic inequality effects. Another problem addressed by this study is that the effect of crime is not bounded by administrative boundaries. A high prevalence of crime in a region may cause a criminal spillover to the surrounding regions. To control for this effect, this study also evaluates the spatial effect of interregional crime rates using the panel spatial autoregressive model as the estimation method. The estimation results revealed that both within-region and across-region economic inequalities have substantial increasing impacts on the crime rate.