Author: guildjames

Return of the Bond Villains

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In 1825 a Javanese prince named Diponegoro touched off a five-year, ultimately unsuccessful, war of resistance against the Dutch colonial government. As detailed by Peter Carey in , one of the causes was a land-rent system imposed by the Dutch on the Javanese sultanate of Yogyakarta. Under this system, landowners were encouraged to rent their estates directly to European plantation owners for the production of cash crops. This had a disruptive effect on the local economy and the Governor-General ordered it halted. But there was a catch. As the land-rent system was unwound, the Javanese landowners were forced to buy out the plantation owners in order to get control of their land back.

Many had already used the rents to buy imported luxury goods, and they fell into debt paying out large and often inflated sums to the plantation owners. The sultan was expected to back-stop these debts using payments he received from the Dutch for granting them the right to collect revenue on the kingdom鈥檚 toll roads. This created a situation where a Javanese merchant travelling from Yogyakarta to Semarang had to pay fees to the Dutch toll road agents. A portion of those fees then went to the sultan, who used them to back-stop debts being incurred by Javanese landowners as they bought back their own land back from European plantation owners.

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Indonesia鈥檚 State-Led Development: Custodian of the National Interest, or Boondoggle?

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industry-4612432_1920Nobel Laureate Esther Duflo once likened the work of economists to 鈥� tinkering and adjusting as necessary as they engage with the details of economic policy-making. The implication in this comparison is that economists generally understand economic systems and behaviour 鈥� how the pipes come together 鈥� and that the main work of the discipline is to fiddle with these components 鈥� adjusting the pressure, replacing valves 鈥� to see what works and what doesn鈥檛.

A critique of this approach was compiled by Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven . The primary criticism is that the basic premise is flawed 鈥� we do not, in fact, have a very complete understanding of how the pipes come together. Often, we don鈥檛 even know where they are. The institutional architecture that determines economic outcomes can vary widely from one country to the next. With so much variation at the systemic-level the utility of 鈥渢inkering鈥� at the margins is questionable.

This blog series will interrogate some of the prevailing assumptions about the relationship between state and capital and look at why and in what ways some economies are deeply intertwined with the state. The structural conditions that actually exist in developing economies are often ignored in mainstream economic analyses 鈥� the prescription for countries with large state-owned sectors is usually some combination of more market liberalization, less protectionism, better enforcement of property rights. This ignores why the economy is structured that way in the first place, and therefore such prescriptions risk being disconnected from the reality on the ground, and thus ineffective.

Indonesia鈥檚 economic trajectory helps to illustrate this point. Despite a long history of sometimes violent anti-communist sentiment, massive portions of the economy are either partially or directly controlled by state-owned enterprises. According to Kyunghoon Kim 鈥�148 SOEs in Indonesia, and their total assets were equivalent to 56.9% of the country’s GDP.鈥� This includes the state-owned oil and gas company Pertamina, three of the four largest banks, the state-owned electric utility PLN which owns the entire national grid, airport operators Angkasa Pura I and II which operate every major commercial airport, the telecom giant PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia and the largest toll road operator Jasa Marga, to name just a few. Read More »