a. Mayors, vice mayors, and regional secretaries: 1981-2012

This is hand-collected data from Indonesian books on local governments in Indonesia. Further data on backgrounds on mayors (starting in the late nineties) was collected from books containing CV’s of mayors, and from the official district government’s websites. 

Acknowledgement: This data took several years to put together and would have been impossible without the painstaking efforts made by several research assistants, especially Dandy Rafitrandi and Hanny Chrysolite.

A small subset of the above data is available at my coauthor, Monica Martinez-Bravo’s website. That data, used for our joint paper, is currently incomplete. I hope to make my full data set on mayors (which will also include the full data set used in our Econometrica 2017 paper) available soon.

 b. Electoral Data for District Legislatures (DPRD II): 2004-2013

Note that this data is for members of the legislatures for district governments (DPRD II), collected directly from the Election commission (KPU) in Jakarta, and then digitized. The 2009-2013 data additionally contains names of candidates in each electoral constituency within the district, and votes obtained. 

Electoral data for the national legislature (DPR) or provincial legislatures (DPRD I) have been published by the KPU and are often publicly available at university libraries around the world (for example this book contains names of members of national and provincial legislatures for the year 1992: https://newcatalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/2810168).

Kevin Evans has been collecting a lot of data on Indonesian elections over the years. You can find this data on his website here: http://www.pemilu.asia.

 c. Civil Servants and Service Providers in Indonesian Districts: 2004 - 2011

This data set consist of the number of civil servants by rank and sub-rank, as well as information on the number of teachers, health workers and doctors, at the district level from 2004 to 2011. These were collected from Badan Kepugawaian Negara (BKN), which is the government department that oversees all matters related to the country’s civil services. 

(i) The World Bank has put most of this data together to create a panel for districts for the years 1994-2011 here: World Bank INDO DAPOER Database

**Note**: This is a fantastic resource, not just for local budgets, but for all sorts of socio-economic indicators, and for a long period of time. The data on budgets was collected in collaboration with APBD, and the other socio-economic indicators are aggregated at the district level from various surveys fielded by the Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS), including PODES, SUSENAS etc.

(ii) The original raw files for local budgets should be accessible from APBD’s website here.

(iii) Occasionally files for older years will be missing on APBD’s website, so I am making the original raw files for 1994-2011 available here:

DATA FILES: Budgets 

Note that files that have an “r” or “R” in the file name refer to the district’s budget realization numbers, and files with an “a” or “A” refer to the district’s planned budget. To my knowledge, both versions were never available for earlier years - only the actual realizations are available in such cases.

Indonesian districts have had a lot of splits over the years. The file below provides a crosswalk of district names and BPS identifiers 1993 onwards. Importantly, the latter can be used for merging to other BPS data sets. The file also contains the corresponding (matched) identifiers to the INDO DAPOER database linked above.

DATA FILE: Districts Crosswalk and Identifiers

a. Governance and Decentralization Surveys

These surveys, done by the World Bank, provide governance and service delivery measures not covered in other surveys that are fielded by the BPS, such as access to, and quality of publicly provided services, and also include questionnaires for local officials. For a complete description of these surveys, and related documentation, see these links: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3.

DATA FILES (incl. survey instruments) - GDS Surveys

b. Governance and Growth Surveys

(The Indonesian Sub-National Growth and Governance Dataset) 

This data set was created through a research project headed by Neil McCulloch at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. The data includes variables on economic performance indicators and local governance indicators for districts in Indonesia between the years 2001 and 2007.

For more information at the IDS website, click here.

DATA FILES (incl. documentation) - Gov and Growth

With information on demographics, education, migration, housing, and occupation.

Digitized historical maps containing information on plantation and administrative boundaries, topographical features including roads and other infrastructure. These maps are from various sources and across different time periods during the colonial period.

Consists of annual information on plantation names, locations, ownership/lease/rental information, crops grown, land size.