Our new ‘Survey of recent developments’ is contributed by Chris Manning and Raden Purnagunawan. The authors perceive a growing confidence in Indonesia's ability to withstand global economic shocks, and argue that it is well placed to maintain economic stability in the shorter term and moderately high growth in the medium term. Fiscal policy has remained conservative, but the government has still not moved to reduce growing fuel and electricity subsidies. A revival of manufacturing in 2011 has been especially evident in the labour-intensive industries, but the authors voice concern about the protectionist flavour of recent government initiatives to promote this sector. A cabinet reshuffle in October also seemed to signal a more dirigiste approach to industry policy – especially with the departure of economist Mari Pangestu from the influential trade portfolio.
Youth unemployment remains a major problem, and the authors argue that a recent ban on migration of domestic helpers to Saudi Arabia will add to labour supply pressures among young people. The government is now considering how to mobilise Indonesia's large population, abundant natural resources and strategic location so as to play a greater role in the world economy. It has formulated a ‘Master Plan’ for longer-term development (2011–25), emphasising development of Outer Island regions through massive investments in energy and ‘connectivity’. Funding (mainly from the private sector), implementation and coordination are seen as major challenges, however.
Greg Fealy's discussion of recent political trends is considerably less optimistic than the economics survey. The author reports that the president has not fulfilled hopes that he would be more reformist and willing to take risks in his second term; rather, he has become more cautious, aloof and regal in style. The political elite, often in concert with the Yudhoyono government, has pushed through a range of democratically regressive measures. The malaise within the party system has deepened, such that now less than a quarter of the electorate professes any party affiliation. Most Islamic parties slid closer to the political periphery, and the largest one was beset by controversy. Responses to a brutal attack on the Ahmadiyah sect showed the limits of Indonesia's much-lauded religious tolerance.
Sofie Arjon Schütte's paper is concerned with the proliferation of new checks and balances, and new state agencies, that has accompanied Indonesia's post-1998 democratisation. The author focuses on the appointment processes for the senior management of these new bodies as a reflection of greater responsiveness to concerns of the public, using the Corruption Eradication Commission as a case study. She reviews the process stipulated by law and its implementation in 2003, 2007 and 2010, arguing that although the short-listing of candidates by a selection committee aims at unprecedented openness and appointment by merit, the process followed has been unnecessarily tedious and has given insufficient weight to candidates’ track records. Nevertheless, the paper concludes, the overall selection process has ensured diversity of political support.
A much less sanguine perspective on the consolidation of new post-Soeharto checks and balances emerges from Simon Butt's discussion of the Corruption Eradication Commission and the associated Anti-Corruption Court. The author notes that the Court's previous 100% conviction record has been punctured by more than 20 acquittals in 2011. His paper explains that both the Court and the Commission have been the targets of efforts to discredit and hobble them. The author 's worrying conclusion is that if the current trend continues, these new agencies may soon join the growing list of Indonesia's failed anti-corruption initiatives.
School enrolment rates of Indonesian children aged 13–15 and 16–18 have increased sharply in recent years. Kazushi Takahashi's paper investigates this phenomenon, focusing on factors associated with the enrolment of secondary school aged children in rural areas. The author finds that the noteworthy disappearance of a gender gap in enrolments between 1993 and 2007 contributed significantly to the rise in overall enrolment rates. He also shows that children living in wealthier communities and in communities with a high proportion of enrolled children are more likely to attend school. By contrast, various school characteristics are shown not to be strongly or consistently correlated with school enrolment.
Our regular set of abstracts of recently completed PhD dissertations on Indonesia includes studies of the forces driving real per capita income in Indonesia; minimum wages and labour market outcomes in Java; and Indonesian regulation of drug patents following the TRIPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) agreements.
The book review section covers works on Indonesia's management of its territorial and jurisdictional rights and obligations over the sea; sustainable development policy (a collection of papers honouring Emil Salim, Indonesia's foremost environmental policy maker, scholar and teacher); Chinese Indonesians and regime change; rice policy, markets and food security; the impact of the global financial crisis on Asian economies; and lessons from post-disaster reconstruction in Aceh.
This will be the last issue of the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies under my editorship. I take this opportunity to thank all of the authors and referees who have contributed to the journal over the last 13 years, as well as the readers whose interest in BIES has sustained its continued existence. I thank our publisher, Taylor & Francis, for helping us to move to online publication from our previous in-house, print-only version, and to online manuscript submission and refereeing. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Australian National University for their kind support. Most particularly, I acknowledge my enormous debt to our Associate Editor, Liz Drysdale, for her extraordinarily strong personal commitment to producing a journal to the highest possible standards, on time, every time. Finally, I thank the ANU and the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) for their continued financial support of the journal.
Selamat membaca!
Ross H. McLeod