Indonesia has cut extreme poverty from 86% to under 4% in four decades

When people talk about how the world has reduced extreme poverty, China usually takes the spotlight. But it is not the only success story. Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, has gone from 86 in every 100 people living in extreme poverty in 1984 to fewer than 4 in 2025, according to World Bank data just highlighted by Our World in Data.

Tap Next to walk through the data step by step.

A fall with one big stumble

The path was not smooth. Extreme poverty fell to 68% by 1996, but the Asian financial crisis pushed it back up to 82.8% in 1998. Since then the decline has been almost continuous: 41% in 2005, 21.6% in 2015 and 3.7% in 2025. China was faster but, as Our World in Data puts it, Indonesia “hasn’t been far behind”.

In people, the change is huge: from about 141 million Indonesians in extreme poverty in 1984 to about 10.5 million in 2025 – while the population grew from 163 million to more than 280 million.

What the headline number doesn’t tell you

The extreme poverty line is deliberately low: $3 a day per person, already adjusted for each country’s cost of living. It shows whether a country is leaving the harshest deprivation behind, not whether its people are doing well. That is why there is debate about which line best measures progress in countries like Indonesia.

With higher lines the picture is more modest. Most of the people who escaped extreme poverty now live on between $4.20 and $8.30 a day. And although more than 100 million Indonesians now live above $8.30, almost two in three are still below it – the poverty line the World Bank uses for upper-middle-income countries.

Even so, the trend is good on those tougher lines too: in 1984, barely 1.2 million Indonesians lived on more than $8.30 a day. The lesson is the same one the data shows around the world: extreme poverty is not inevitable, and it can fall fast.

How we made this chart: the figures are those published by Our World in Data from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform (2021 dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity), rounded to one or two decimals. We only plot years with published data. Two figures are our own calculations: “130 million fewer” (140.8 million in 1984 minus 10.5 million in 2025) and “almost two in three”: the 183.1 million Indonesians living on less than $8.30 a day in 2025 (10.5 + 33.8 + 138.8) divided by that year’s total population in the same source (285.7 million), or 64%.