Publication: Indonesia Economic Quarterly, December 2015: Reforming Amid Uncertainty
Loading...
Date
2015-12
ISSN
Published
2015-12
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The Indonesia Economic Quarterly (IEQ) has two main aims. First, it reports on the key developments over the past three months in Indonesia’s economy, and places these in a longerterm and global context. Based on these developments, and on policy changes over the period, the IEQ regularly updates the outlook for Indonesia’s economy and social welfare. Second, the IEQ provides a more in-depth examination of selected economic and policy issues, and analysis of Indonesia’s medium-term development challenges. It is intended for a wide audience, including policymakers, business leaders, financial market participants, and the community of analysts and professionals engaged in Indonesia’s evolving economy. This paper discusses about the economic conditions of Indonesia for the year 2015. Emerging market assets rebounded in October 2015 after the sharp losses recorded in August and September, when the uncertainty about the Chinese economic slowdown and the U.S. interest rate outlook was particularly high. Despite a more favorable market sentiment, capital flows to emerging economies have remained weak and borrowing costs relatively high. In addition to tight financing conditions, Indonesia faced subdued external demand for its exports in the near term and persistently low commodity prices over the medium run. In 2015, fire in Indonesia cost nearly twice that of reconstruction following the 2004 tsunami in Aceh. Agriculture and forestry have sustained losses and damages in trillions. Sustained exposure to haze could also lead to the volcano effect, i.e., a decrease in plant productivity in the short term due to limited sun exposure and a deleterious effect on plant physiology and photosynthesis. The recurring nature of Indonesia’s fire crisis is of particular concern. Another potential step in Indonesia’s new reform process was the country’s signaling its intention to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement in the near future. Whether membership materializes or not, the agreement is likely to have a limited impact on trade, because import tariffs in member countries are already low and Indonesia has trade agreements with most of them.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2015. Indonesia Economic Quarterly, December 2015: Reforming Amid Uncertainty. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24437 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Indonesia Economic Quarterly, July 2014 : Hard Choices(Washington, DC, 2014-07)The Indonesia Economic Quarterly (IEQ) has two main objectives. First, it reports on the key developments over the past three months in Indonesia's economy, and places these in a longer term and global context. Based on these developments, and on policy changes over the period, the IEQ regularly updates the outlook for Indonesia's economy and social welfare. Second, the IEQ provides a more in-depth examination of selected economic and policy issues, and analysis of Indonesia s medium-term development challenges. It is intended for a wide audience, including policymakers, business leaders, financial market participants, and the community of analysts and professionals engaged in Indonesia's evolving economy. As Indonesians await the results of a presidential election on July 9, 2014 and plan for the upcoming inauguration of a new president in October, they face hard policy choices. The past decade of solid growth has contributed to considerable development progress. Indonesia now has the world's tenth largest economy in purchasing power parity-adjusted terms; however, there remains a clear risk that the recent moderation in economic growth could intensify. Against a backdrop of weakening revenue growth and rising energy subsidy spending, this would further constrain development expenditures in critical areas such as infrastructure, social protection and health. The new government will face an evolving global environment, which is expected to pick up speed later this year. The price of Indonesia's top six exports, accounting for 50 percent of total export revenues, continues to soften, falling by 8.6 percent in 2014 through June, led by coal (down 15.2 percent). The recent volatility of oil prices, due in part to the turmoil in Iraq, highlights the ongoing vulnerability of Indonesia's fiscal position to higher international oil prices. Real GDP growth in Indonesia moderated to 5.2 percent year-on-year and 4.3 percent quarter-on-quarter at a seasonally-adjusted annualized rate in the first quarter of 2014. Safeguarding hard-fought poverty reduction and social protection progress in Indonesia also calls for enhancing the management of disaster risks. This edition of the IEQ examines one such disaster risk: forest and land fires.Publication Indonesia Economic Quarterly, December 2010(Jakarta, 2010-12)The Indonesian economic quarterly reports on and synthesizes the past three months' key developments in Indonesia's economy. Its coverage ranges from the macro economy to financial markets to indicators of human welfare and development. It is intended for a wide audience, including policy makers, business leaders, and financial market participants, and the community of analysts and professionals engaged in Indonesia's evolving economy. The challenge for Indonesia is to maximize the opportunities that this brings, in terms of enhancing future growth and making investments that can improve the welfare of the entire population, while managing the associated risks. Strong capital inflows, particularly portfolio, have been seen across emerging markets, including Indonesia. These inflows are driven by yield differentials and the stronger growth prospects, and improved creditworthiness, of emerging economies relative to heavily indebted, higher-income economies. Further quantitative easing in the US has provided an additional, cyclical boost to this trend. Global commodity prices also picked up in recent months. In November, the US dollar price of non-energy commodities rose by 3.4 percent over the month with food and raw material prices up by 4.9 percent and 7.6 percent, respectively. The underlying drivers were strong growth in demand from emerging economies, particularly China, and also supply disruptions in the agriculture sector.Publication Indonesia Economic Quarterly, October 2011(World Bank, Jakarta, 2011-10)External events have dominated economic developments for Indonesia over the past quarter. The outlook for global growth has weakened and the euro zone sovereign debt crisis has intensified. International risk aversion and market volatility have increased, although they remain well below levels seen in late 2008. Equity markets have fallen and emerging markets have seen capital outflows, putting downward pressure on their currencies. Indonesia's domestic economic performance has continued to be strong but, as in other countries in the region, its financial markets have not been immune from this turbulence. Indonesia's domestic drivers of growth, its solid fiscal position, accumulation of reserves, and strengthened financial sector performance make it relatively well-placed to deal with shocks arising from the above scenarios. This improved resilience to external shocks, and a strong policy response, was seen during the 2008- 09 crisis. The final piece looks at the core development challenge of how to make growth more inclusive, as well as higher, focusing on an analysis of the province of East java.Publication Indonesia Economic Quarterly FY14 : Compilation of the July 2013, October 2013, December 2013 and March 2014 Indonesia Economic Quarterly Reports(Washington, DC, 2014-06)The Indonesia Economic Quarterly (IEQ) has two main aims. First, it reports on the key developments over the past three months in Indonesia's economy, and places these in a longer term and global context. Based on these developments and on policy changes over the period, the IEQ regularly updates the outlook for Indonesia's economy and social welfare. Second, the IEQ provides a more in-depth examination of selected economic and policy issues, and analysis of Indonesia's medium-term development challenges. It is intended for a wide audience, including policymakers, business leaders, financial market participants, and the community of analysts and professionals engaged in Indonesia's evolving economy. Indonesia's fiscal and monetary policy settings will continue to play a key role in facilitating the adjustments now taking place and in minimizing associated risks. There are, however, trade-offs between the objectives of restraining inflation, supporting growth and adjusting the current account deficit to the tighter financing environment. Monetary policy faces the challenge of calibrating interest and exchange rates so as to guard against rising inflationary pressures as cost pressures rise (such as from the pass-through of the weaker currency or wage increases) while facilitating improvements in the external balances, and without unduly crimping economic growth and weakening public and private sector balance sheets. With the 2014 budget under discussion with Parliament, fiscal policy faces the challenge of slower revenue growth, and higher energy subsidy and nominal debt-financing costs, raising the importance of lifting further the quality of spending and of revenue mobilization. In response to the intensification of financial market pressures, and in conjunction with the monetary policy and currency market measures mentioned above, on August 23 the Government announced a policy package containing measures intended to improve the current account, safeguard purchasing power and facilitate growth, contain inflationary pressure, and maintain investment flows. Some of the reform measures involved retracting interventionist policies on trade and proposals for improving certainty in the business environment.Publication Indonesia Economic Quarterly, October 2013 : Continuing Adjustment(World Bank, Jakarta, 2013-10)The Indonesia Economic Quarterly (IEQ) has two main aims. First, it reports on the key developments over the past three months in Indonesia's economy, and places these in a longer-term and global context. Based on these developments and on policy changes over the period, the IEQ regularly updates the outlook for Indonesia's economy and social welfare. Second, the IEQ provides a more in-depth examination of selected economic and policy issues, and analysis of Indonesia's medium-term development challenges. It is intended for a wide audience, including policymakers, business leaders, financial market participants, and the community of analysts and professionals engaged in Indonesia's evolving economy. A key component of the reform process has been the devolution of responsibility for basic education services to local governments and schools, and improvements in local governance can thus play a vital role in raising the quality of basic education and ensuring children leave school with adequate skills. Indeed, the Indonesian Local Education Governance (ILEG) surveys, conducted in 2009 and 2012, suggest that the quality of local governance is important for improving district education performance, making it important to continue to address key governance constraints, and to better coordinate and integrate central government financing in local education planning.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Design Thinking for Social Innovation(2010-07)Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.Publication Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06)The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.Publication Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08)The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.Publication Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008(2009-06-01)This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.Publication Breaking the Conflict Trap : Civil War and Development Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003)Most wars are now civil wars. Even though international wars attract enormous global attention, they have become infrequent and brief. Civil wars usually attract less attention, but they have become increasingly common and typically go on for years. This report argues that civil war is now an important issue for development. War retards development, but conversely, development retards war. This double causation gives rise to virtuous and vicious circles. Where development succeeds, countries become progressively safer from violent conflict, making subsequent development easier. Where development fails, countries are at high risk of becoming caught in a conflict trap in which war wrecks the economy and increases the risk of further war. The global incidence of civil war is high because the international community has done little to avert it. Inertia is rooted in two beliefs: that we can safely 'let them fight it out among themselves' and that 'nothing can be done' because civil war is driven by ancestral ethnic and religious hatreds. The purpose of this report is to challenge these beliefs.