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With much of the rest of the world still struggling out of the prolonged recession, Indonesia continues to enjoy an export boom. Partly because Japanese reasons such as failure of Brazil`s coffee crop, partly because Japanese demand for oil, timber and other products is again expanding, most of Indonesia`s major exports have benefited from favourable world prices and some from substantially expanded sales. While imports also appear to have continued to rise, buoyant export earnings and large capital inflow have raised Indonesia`s international reserves from their Pertamina crisis low of $442 million in September 1975 to $2.5 billion in August of this year.
Following in the footsteps of Korea and Taiwan, Indonesia has begun to look to the Middle East as a market for agricultural and industrial products. A new interest in possibilities of manufacture for export also plays a part in Indonesia`s active role in developing ASEAN cooperation. But for Indonesia to break into the highly competitive market for labour intensive manufacturing is not proving easy, despite her low wages.
The domestic business climate, still somewhat under the shadow of the Pertamina crisis, the world recession and the emergence of excess capacity in some sectors remains subdued, though there have been signs in recent months of a quickening of domestic and foreign investment. A number of very large new resource development projects have got under way or are about to do so, some of them to be financed by Middle East money. An unprecedentedly energetic anti-corruption campaign, launched in late June, may, if its momentum is maintained, do much to make life easier for private citizens and business.
An active fiscal policy helped in 1976/7 to counteract the expansionary effect of rising international reserves on money supply. It will need to do so again this year, especially if business demand for bank credit picks up. So far, these policies, reinforced by large rice imports, have been successful in reducing the rate of inflation which promises in 1977 to remain at one-digit level for the first time since 1971. An institutional development in the monetary sphere, as yet mainly of symbolical significance, is the establishment of a stock exchange designed to encourage domestic equity financing of companies.
Agriculture remains the most worrying and vulnerable sector of the economy. The problems besetting the rice industry continue unabated, with mounting evidence that failure of many of the new village cooperatives (BUUD) to operate efficiently is playing a major part in the slowdown of fertiliser use and of output growth. With ample stocks and very large planned imports of rice, the authorities should have no difficulty in keeping prices stable. But the urgency of breaking through the obstacles to increased production, not only of rice but also of other food and smallholder cash crops, is becoming ever more apparent.
The past five years have brought a remarkable transformation of the structure of the iIndonesian economy. The share of agriculture in gross domestic product has fallen from 44 to 36 per cent, with rapid gains in the shares of mining, manufacturing, construction and services. The growth of the modern sector, however, cannot in itself solve the two most urgent problems, food and jobs for the growing population. Indeed, the oil bonanza, by obviating the need for adjustment of the exchange rate to Indonesia`s more rapid inflation, has made the labour intensive import-competing manufacturing sector increasingly dependent on tariff protection and has depressed incomes and incentives in the traditional export industries. Paradoxically,despite Indonesia`s record international reserves, there have been calls for a devaluation of the rupiah which the Government has emphatically rejected. But a major problem of adjustment remains. |
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