Measuring the Distance to 2030 Targets in Indonesia Which SDGs That Indonesia Need to Prioritize? A Distance-to-Target Approach

Abstract

This chapter aims to assess where Indonesia stands now in terms of SDGs target achievement and to identify the areas where additional effort and policy initiative is needed in order to achieve the goals. The method we use is the Distance-to-target approach. First used by OECD (2019), the method estimates the standardised different of a Indonesia’s achievement to the SDGs target in 2030. The advantage of this approach is it measures the achievement of Indonesia’s SDGs benchmarked against other countries with relevant comparator. From the analysis, it was found that Indonesia is gaining good progress in achieving some target of SDGs such as reducing extreme poverty (SDG-1), food security (SDG-2), or access to education (SDG-4), but still need a lot of acceleration in some aspects of the same goals such as social assistance coverage (SDG-1), child malnutrition (SDG-3) and quality learning (SDG-4).To help accelerate the SDGs achievement, Indonesia need to improve policies to (a) increase the coverage of its social protection; (b) reduce children stunting; (c) reduce smoking prevalence; (d) improve its health infrastructure; (e) focus more on students proficiency in addition of access; (f) reduce its youth unemployment; and (g) improve its natural resource management. We believe it is not a coincidence that these aspects are of critical importance too in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.