Viral claim Debunked: Indonesia Is Not the World’s Second-Poorest Nation
A widely circulated infographic falsely claiming Indonesia is the second-poorest country globally has been debunked by a Tempo fact-check examination. The posts, appearing on platforms like Instagram, Threads, and Facebook, cited purported data from the World Bank to support the claim, ranking Indonesia behind only Zimbabwe in poverty rates. However, the World Bank has confirmed it does not publish such rankings and the data presented in the infographic is misleading.
The misleading posts featured a table listing countries and their alleged poverty rates, placing Indonesia at 60.3 percent,while Zimbabwe topped the list at 84.2 percent and El Salvador at 25.1 percent. Some versions of the claim specifically referenced the World Bank’s “Global Poverty lines 2025” or “Macro Poverty Outlook 2025” reports as the source.
Tempo’s verification process, involving a review of official World Bank databases and interviews with macroeconomic researchers, revealed a critical discrepancy: the World Bank has never officially issued a ranking of the world’s poorest countries. Instead, the institution categorizes nations based on income levels – low-income, lower-middle-income, and upper-middle-income – and establishes poverty thresholds for each tier.
The World Bank’s updated Global Poverty Line, as of June 2025, sets specific thresholds for these income categories. Lines document, published in June 2025, details updates following the release of the International comparison Programme (ICP) data in May 2024. The ICP data utilizes Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) – a method for converting currencies to a comparable unit by accounting for price level variations – to ensure accurate international comparisons based on actual purchasing power, rather than fluctuating exchange rates. This update established a new international poverty line of US$3.00 per person per day,replacing the previous standard of US$2.15.Importantly, the document does not rank countries by poverty level.
The Macro Poverty outlook (MPO), released in October 2025, analyzes macroeconomic developments and poverty in 149 developing countries. Published twice yearly, it provides country-specific notes with recent developments, macroeconomic projections, and poverty level forecasts for 2025-2027, alongside discussions of key challenges related to economic growth, stability, and poverty reduction.
While the World Bank’s data indicates a important portion of Indonesia’s population lives below the poverty line – 60.3 percent using the US$8.30 PPP per day standard – this figure differs substantially from national statistics. The Central Statistics Agency (BPS) reported a national poverty rate of 8.57 percent, or approximately 24.06 million people, as of September 2024, using a poverty threshold of Rp595,242 per capita per month (approximately Rp19,841 per day). The World Bank clarifies that its global standards are designed for cross-country comparisons,not domestic policy formulation.
Moreover, Indonesia’s recent transition to upper-middle-income status is relatively new, with a Gross National Income (GNI) per capita of US$4,870 in 2023, just exceeding the US$4,516 threshold for this classification.
According to World Data, the world’s ten poorest countries, based on 2024 gross national income (GNI), are located in Africa, with Central African republic ranking first, followed by Burundi, Mozambique, Sudan, and Somalia. It’s crucial to remember that GNI values vary considerably across countries due to differing price levels, necessitating the use of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) for fair international comparisons. The “dollar” figures in these reports, therefore, represent “PPP dollars,” a conceptual currency used solely for analytical purposes.
Tempo’s fact-check conclusively demonstrates that the claim portraying Indonesia as the world’s second-poorest country, following Zimbabwe, is demonstrably false.
