Wealth inequality is an economic challenge faced by all countries in the world. In every country, there will always be high income and low income people. Unless a country implements full communism doctrine, there will always a high variance in the income of the society of a country. However, the practice of communism to eliminate inequality is not justifiable because the costs of doing so are bigger than the benefits.
Indonesia has been trapped in the world of inequality for so long. This is not a trivial inequality that we are talking about here. There is a huge gap between the rich and poor people in Indonesia. For example, the richest person in Indonesia based on Forbes December 2007; Abu Rizal Bakrie has Rp.50.22 trillion of net worth. It is greatly contradictive if we contrast his financial condition to that of the poverty in Indonesia. World Bank states that people with daily living expenses less than $2/day falls below the poverty line. Using that definition, approximately 60% of Indonesians are in the category of poor people. I constantly see children around the traffic light begging for money, just to have enough pennies to buy their next lunch. They wear weary clothes and education is merely a dream for them. This is happening all the time, in every part of Indonesia. Indonesia has an income per capita of $1,640. It seems like okay compared to Burundi?s per capita income of $119 (which is the lowest in the world). However, when we take a closer look, we will notice that the income per capita does not consider the great discrepancy of income between rich people and poor people.
Moreover, the trend is that rich people get richer while poor people get poorer. The recent Merrill Lynch research done shows that the number of rich people in Indonesia (have more than $1 million) increases 19.2% in 2007. This is the third fastest growth in