Rusli Abdulah

PhD Student, GSID Nagoya University · Development economics, regional sciences, political economy

Villages · Satellites · Causal evidence

Reading Indonesia’s economy from the ground up.

Growth, jobs, poverty and inflation all have a geographic address. This site shows where, using satellite imagery, village census data and causal identification.

See the research
About me

514

districts and cities in one regional panel, from Aceh to Papua

INDONESIA514 · open repository

Research · Regional Statistics 16(3), 2026

The design was uniform, but the villages were not.

A decade of the Village Fund, read across ~75,000 villages: who grew, and who was left behind.

Read the paper

10+

years of Village Fund transfers to every village

VIIRS nighttime lights · PODES

Data & Maps · Sentinel-5P NO₂

Mudik, seen from the sky.

The mass Eid homecoming shows up in emissions data before it appears in official statistics. Maps free to cite with attribution.

Open the map

Illustration · replace with the published map

Tutorials · STATA · R · GeoDa

Methods you can rerun yourself.

Step-by-step guides for Susenas, PODES and spatial data, with code, practice data and expected output.

Start learning

3

tools, each with code, practice data and expected output

STATA · R · GeoDa

80,000villages (ADM 4)

7,200sub-districts (ADM 3)

514districts (ADM 2)

38provinces (ADM 1)

Start here

Three ways into the work

RESEARCH

Papers & working papers

Village Fund, toll roads, food security. Each entry has a plain-language summary and a PDF.

Browse research →

DATA & MAPS

Maps you can cite

One map, about 150 words of context. Free for media use with attribution.

Open the gallery →

POLICY & OP-EDS

Commentary in Indonesian

National issues read through village and satellite data, plus pieces in The Jakarta Post and The Conversation.

Read the op-eds →

The archive

Five sections, one lens: where things happen

5

4

3

3

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Policy & Op-eds

Data & Maps

Research

Tutorials

Notes

Every post starts from a place: a village, a district, a corridor. Growth, jobs, poverty and prices all have an address.

Themes

What I work on

VF

Village Fund

Dana Desa, BUMDes and Kopdes, measured with PODES and nighttime lights.

TR

Infrastructure

Trans-Java Toll Road and industrial relocation from West to Central Java.

FS

Food security

Spatial patterns of food security, rice prices and the farmland behind them.

SE

Spatial methods

LISA, spatial econometrics and causal inference, taught in STATA, R and GeoDa.

Path

From the newsroom to satellite data

Education

BA & MA in Development Economics (IESP), FEB Diponegoro University

Journalism

Economics reporter, Suara Merdeka

2014–

Researcher, INDEF Jakarta: rural economy, food and fiscal policy

2023–2027

PhD candidate, GSID Nagoya University

Next

After PhD life

Data & Maps

Latest maps

Full gallery →

Map of Indonesia's districts coloured by Food Security Index group

Food security atlas, 514 districts

Bapanas IKP · 2024–2026 · EN/ID

Map of NO₂ emissions across Indonesia during Eid 2025

Mudik through emissions

Sentinel-5P NO₂ · Java · EN/ID

LISA cluster map of poverty in Central Java, 2022

Poverty clusters in Central Java

LISA · Moran’s I · districts

Choropleth map of GRDP across Indonesia's 514 districts

GRDP dashboard, 514 districts

BPS PDRB · INDONESIA514

map image

Food security map

Journal article · 2025

map image

Trans-Java Toll Road corridor

VIIRS nighttime lights · coming soon

“

Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.

Waldo Tobler · First Law of Geography, 1970

Latest

New on the site

Swipe or scroll sideways for more →

Contact

Data, maps or a question?

Open to research collaboration on village economies, food security, the Village Fund and structural transformation, and to questions about the data and maps here.

Email · rusli_abdulah[at]outlook[dot]com
Affiliation · GSID Nagoya · INDEF
Google Scholar ↗ · GitHub ↗
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