Trisha Baga. Spare Parts, 2023.
| INDONESIA’S ELECTION On Wednesday, Prabowo Subtiano was officially declared the winner of Indonesia’s 2024 election. The former defense minister has promised to continue the legacy of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, with an agenda that includes industrial downstreaming, infrastructure development, and “good neighbor” policies with both the US and China. In a 2007 report, YASUYUKI MATSUMOTO examines how speculative finance made Indonesia particularly vulnerable during the 1998 East Asian financial crisis, which was a precursor to the end of Suharto’s dictatorship: “A number of studies link debt accumulation by the private sector to the liberalization policies that were actively pursued in East Asia’s crisis-affected countries in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, the private sector’s external debt problem is viewed as a result of capital account liberalization. Indonesia undertook a dramatic deregulation of its financial sector in the 1980s and by the 1990s had one of the most liberalized financial markets in the world. Deregulation policies were introduced between 1983 and 1989. In June 1983, bank credit ceilings and most interest rate controls were eliminated. In December 1987, a deregulation package for the investment and capital markets was introduced, in which daily price controls on the Jakarta Stock Exchange were eliminated. In October 1988, the government introduced a major banking reform and deregulation package that eliminated restrictions on the opening of new banks, branches, and foreign joint-venture banks. In December 1988, the amendment and supplemental package Paket 20 December 1988 was introduced, allowing foreign ownership of securities companies. The government refined PAKTO in March 1989 and changed foreign borrowing restrictions on bank and non-bank financial institutions to controls on net open positions. It is not surprising that the monitoring system and regulatory framework was not put in place as quickly as the new financial products, services, and institutions. During the finance boom, the Indonesian corporate sector accumulated offshore private debt and transformed the economy from robust to fragile and unstable while economic fundamentals remained essentially sound.” + “Unlike Prabowo, who had planned to reshape the political system to suit his interests, Jokowi had no intention of radically changing the polity. This also meant that he allowed the forces of the establishment to aggressively defend their interests.” By Marcus Mietzner. Link. And see a JATAM report on Jokowi’s controversial job creation bill. Link. + “Palm oil-based green energy is very problematic, as it has the potential to accelerate the expansion of palm oil plantations into forests.” Firdaus Cahyadi on Prabowo’s climate policy. Link. And see Sirojuddin Arif’s new PW essay on Prabowo’s developmental policies. Link. + “Resource nationalism in Indonesia is a top-down, corporate project that has been largely determined by a rising class of domestic business elites.” By Eve Warburton. Link. And in a PW essay from last year, Alvin Camba examines Indonesia’s export ban on nickel. Link. |
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