Can Knowledge and Culture Eradicate Poverty and Reduce Income Inequality? The Evidence from Indonesia

This research aims to investigate the potential role of knowledge and cultural in reducing income inequality and alleviating poverty in Indonesia. The method used includes panel data regression estimation with the least squares dummy variable approach, compounded with an interactive session. The results showed that knowledge and cultural have a significant effect on income inequality, poverty, and development. This research has developed a knowledge-based and cultural-based development framework, by incorporating democracy-political institution as a new proxy variable for knowledge and tourism-cultural, as well as active participation as determinants of the cultural economy. The significance of cultural heritage possesses a remarkable capacity to attract tourists, thereby generating revenue, and bears indigenous wisdom and knowledge, inherent to local communities. This research stands out from the previous due to the unique combination of democracy-political institution determinants and cultural economy, which creates a blend of knowledge and cultural. By filling the gap left by previous research that solely focused on these areas independently, this research presents a holistic understanding of the subject matter.