Survey of recent developments

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Notes

• ^aThe horizontal axis measures days before and after each bomb attack.

• Source: <finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=%5EJKSE>.

Source: CEIC Asia Database.

• ^aData apply to an employee with four years' service with the firm being dismissed because of economic restructuring.

• Sources: Departments of Labour in the countries shown.

Sources: Output: Department of Energy and Mineral Resources, Directorate of Mineral and Coal Enterprises, <www.dpmb.esdm. go.id>; prices: International Financial Statistics Online, <ifs.apdi.net/imf/>; investment: 1993–98, <strategis.gc.ca/epic/internet/inimr-ri.nsf/fr/gr-81122f.html>; 1999–2002, Department of Energy and Mineral Resources, Directorate General of Geology and Mineral Resources, <www.djgsm.esdm.go.id>.

Remarkably, two days before the poll, the president-elect defended his recently completed doctoral dissertation at the Bogor Agricultural Institute (IPB). His dissertation is entitled ‘Pembangunan Pertanian dan Pedesaan Sebagai Upaya untuk Mengatasi Masalah Pengangguran dan Kemiskinan: Analisis Ekonomi Politik Kebijakan Fiskal’ [Agricultural and Rural Development as a Means of Overcoming Unemployment and Poverty: A Political Economy Analysis of Fiscal Policy].

The power of the presidential office and highly personalistic politics have enabled other strong leaders to govern effectively with initially very limited parliamentary support. One need go no further than the Philippine experience under the Ramos presidency to find support for this proposition.

Stock prices and exchange rates for weekends and public holidays are assumed to be the same as those for the previous working day.

We are grateful to Professor I.B. Pitana of Udayana University in Denpasar for this insight. The surprisingly rapid recovery of Bali tourism refers principally to visitor numbers. Expenditure has recovered more slowly, owing to the switch from foreign to domestic tourism and from longer-stay northern hemisphere sources to shorter-stay Asia–Pacific visitors.

According to a report by the Center for the Study of Indonesian Property, property construction activity has jumped from Rp 12.1 trillion in 2001 to Rp 49.3 trillion in 2003 and an estimated Rp 63.5 trillion in 2004. Over half the 2003 figure was reported to be construction of retail centres.

These data, and all subsequent statistics on Japanese FDI, are from the same source as that shown in table 6.

One survey concluded that the average age of spinning and weaving machinery is 20 years and 15 years, respectively, though for garments it is just five years (Aswicahyono et al. 2004).

We are most grateful to Archanun Kohpaiboon for computing these data, and to Prema-chandra Athukorala for drawing our attention to these data sources.

Two particular weaknesses of the BKPM data should be noted in the current context. First, the domestic figures have very little significance, since BKPM registration is not required and the incentives to register are very limited. Second, and inexplicably, BKPM continues to exclude the oil/gas and finance sectors from its purview. Both are large recipients of FDI, and East Asian investors have been particularly important in them (e.g. China in oil, Singapore in banks).

See Ray (2003) for an analysis of the low productivity and high costs in Indonesian ports.

We wish to thank Roger Farrell for guiding us to the source of table 6.

We are most grateful to Bambang Heru Sentosa, Head of the Regional Accounts at the Central Statistics Agency, for kindly providing these data.

Regional administrative and political arrangements continue to be in a state of flux. Since 2000, the number of provinces has risen from 26 (i.e. the 27 for most of the Soeharto era, less East Timor) to the 30 recorded in table 7, to 32 (with the addition of Irian Jaya Barat and the Riau Islands). In September 2004, another new province, West Sulawesi, was created. The increase in the number of second-level districts (kabupaten and kota) has been even more dramatic—from 353 around 2000 to 370 in 2002 and 442 by mid-2004; see Fitrani et al. (forthcoming) for a detailed discussion of this phenomenon.