Free Nutritious Meal Program (MBG) in the Perspective of Public Financial Management: Cost Efficiency Analysis and Financial Performance Index

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-752-1_27How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Fiscal Efficiency; Free Nutritious Meal Program; CEA; IKK; Public Financial Management

Abstract

This research focuses on fiscal efficiency in the administration of Free Nutritious Meal Program (MBG) in the first year of its operating in 2025. The descriptive-evaluative quantitative design was used based on 3 official data sources, the State Budget Realization Report (APBN KiTa) of the Ministry of Finance, the operational records of the National Nutrition Agency (BGN), and the data of the BPS Susenas School Enrollment Rate (APS) over the years 2018-2023. It was analysed by three analytical tools such as Cost Efficiency Analysis (CEA) to quantify the cost of unit services and descriptive APS trend analysis as a baseline of educational participation prior to the implementation and min-max normalization to create the Financial Performance Index (IKK). CEA provides a cost-per-beneficiary (CER-1) of IDR 917,409 per year and cost-per-serving (CER-2) of IDR 3,822 per day both 47-57 percent less than the WFP median of similar countries in the lower-middle-income category. The IKK composite of 0.753 shows that fiscal governance is generally good, although the budget absorption sub-score (72.54), shows that budget implementation remains at the end of the fiscal year. These results indicate that the major issue facing MBG in the first year is not the expensive unit costs but the lack of even budget implementation over time-periods- this is a governance problem, not an efficiency problem. The 2025 MBG budget management is categorized as Good performance level, according to the modified IPKD, which is a test that demonstrates that the program is economically feasible and must be supported at the institutional level, not redesigned. The paper contributes to the existing literature on the topic of public financial management by not only being the first statistical examination of fiscal efficiency of a large-scale school feeding program using only official Indonesian budgetary realization data, but also developing a reproducible IKK tool to further fiscal monitoring of social programs.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yuherna Yuherna
AU  - Ricka Yanna
AU  - Reniati Reniati
AU  - Christianingrum Christianingrum
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/04
TI  - Free Nutritious Meal Program (MBG) in the Perspective of Public Financial Management: Cost Efficiency Analysis and Financial Performance Index
BT  - Proceedings of the9th International Conference on Business, Economics, Social Sciences & Humanities – Economics, Business and Management Track (ICOBEST-EBM 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 312
EP  - 335
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-752-1_27
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-752-1_27
ID  - Yuherna2026
ER  -