Category: Indonesia

Neoliberalism on Trial: Jokowi 2.0, Omnibus Bill and the New Capital City

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When the majority of Southeast Asian countries began to enact more aggressive responses to the novel coronavirus, Indonesia turned a deaf ear to virus mitigation efforts. As it had no confirmed cases of the coronavirus as of February, Joko Widodo鈥檚 (Jokowi) government instead kept pushing extensive economic reform agendas. It submitted a 1,028-page Job Creation Omnibus Bill on 12 February, calling the bill the country鈥檚 third great structural reform program after the聽 1998 International Monetary Fund鈥檚 (IMF) Letter of Intent and the 1967 Foreign Direct Investment Law. Despite criticism from the opposition, the president insisted on this neoliberal agenda, claiming that the objective of the bill is to promote more foreign direct investment (FDI) in the manufacturing sector and thus create more jobs.聽

What effects do neoliberal policies have on political and economic life in Indonesia and state-capital relations in particular? This blog post follows David (2006) in taking a historical-geographical approach to investigate this question, with a focus on policies put in place in the current president Jokowi鈥檚 second term. For , such a bold move to deregulate the economy signals the resurgence of state-led development in a new form. Put differently, what this article would like to argue is that deregulation, an all-encompassing hegemonic ideology rather than simply a policy, has become some sort of 鈥榖anner to unite under鈥� for the ruling capitalist class in Indonesia.聽Read More »

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 »