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5943 results in Economics: general interest

Page 66 of 298

  • Living on the Edge: Being Malay (and Bugis) in the Riau Islands

  • Andrew M. Carruthers
  • Book:
    Living on the Edge
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2018, pp 1-54

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION: “LIKE BLACK AND WHITE PARTS OF THE EYE”

    In April 2008, and only six years following the legal formation and secession of Indonesia's Riau Islands Province (Provinsi Kepulauan Riau or KEPRI) from adjacent Riau Province, then Governor of Riau H.M. Rusli Zainal (2003–13) attended a meeting of the Kerukunan Keluarga Sulawesi Selatan (KKSS) or the “South Sulawesi Family Association” in Riau's provincial capital of Pekanbaru. The South Sulawesi Family Association is one of Indonesia's largest and most active ethno-regional associations, with members hailing from or tracing their roots to South Sulawesi, an east Indonesian province widely known as the ancestral homeland of Indonesia's Bugis people. Outnumbering that province's indigenous Makassarese, Mandar and Torajan peoples, South Sulawesi's Bugis people are historically renowned as much for their seafaring prowess as they are for the wanderlust that fuels their travels throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, and beyond in “search of good fortune” (Bugis: massappa’ dallé).

    The Riau Governor, a “Malay of Bugis ancestry” (Malay: Melayu keturunan Bugis), had been previously honoured by the ethno-regional association with the honorary “title” or gelar of Daeng Magguna. Roughly translatable to “he who is useful”, the title bestowed upon the Riau Governor by the association featured the Bugis-Makassar honorific “Daeng”, commonly given to Bugis-Makassar people of noble birth. Daeng is also a title whose meaning reverberates in the historical imaginary of Riau and Riau Islands Provinces, two places whose contemporary borders closely align with those of the once-sprawling Malay Sultanate that stretched from what we today call Indonesia, through Singapore, to Malaysia. Among Riau Islanders and their neighbours in Riau Province, the noble honorific Daeng is iconically associated with five legendary Bugis brothers — Daeng Parani, Daeng Marewah, Daeng Menambun, Daeng Celak, and Daeng Kemasi — whose involvement in the region changed the course of history across the Malay world in the early eighteenth century.

    Riau Governor H.M. Rusli Zainal (alias Daeng Magguna) used his April meeting with the South Sulawesi Family Association to thank them for their continuing support and involvement in Riau's everyday life, but also to ruminate on the ethno-historical linkages between the Bugis people and the region's indigenous, ethnically Malay community. “Both of these people since the beginning cannot be separated”, the Governor said.

  • Chapter Four - Extremis Morbis Extrema Remedia – Analytical Summary of Hörnigk's Oesterreich über alles (1684)

  • Edited by Philipp Roessner
  • Translated by Keith Tribe
  • Book:
    Austria Supreme, if it so Wishes (1684): 'A Strategy that Made Europe Rich'
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    25 June 2018, pp 69-92

  • Summary

    Hörnigk's Theoretical Achievement

    Hornigk's book was a product of the mainstream – Cameralist-Mercantilist economics as it emerged to perfection between 1650 and 1750. But in many ways, with his Nine Principles or ‘Rules’ of Economic Development (see later in this chapter), Hornigk was the one who would set the tone for years to come. Even Ekelund and Tollison, who portrayed Mercantilist theory and practice in a rather bizarre way, took Hornigk's Nine Rules of economic development as representing Mercantilist thought in a nutshell (interestingly, they did not bother too much about Cameralism; while getting Hornigk's first rule wrong). On the one hand, Hornigk put into words what many others thought in his day. Economics was symbiotically linked with the big political issues of his day. We must not forget that anti-French publications and discourses reached a climax towards the beginning of the 1680s in the German territories. This had to do with the expansionist, and at times openly aggressive, policies of Louis XIV, the great French Sun King, who strove to turn France into the most powerful state in Europe. For this goal, he was admired and feared at the same time by his contemporaries. Alliances and allegiances were fluid and kept changing; in German politics pro-and anti-French stances were to be found coexisting and alternating sometimes within the same territory. Politics were not quite as ideological yet as they would be in later centuries, especially the twentieth century. Political stances and diplomatic connections could vary in the blink of an eye, with the death of a prince or a new bribe. They were in more or less constant flux throughout the 1660s and 1670s in the territories of the empire – especially as so many of these mini-states existed in the heart of Europe, which increased the demand for, as well as the supply of, itinerant messengers, ambassadors, negotiators and other diplomats, a new class of individuals that made politics and lobbyism increasingly their main business.

Austria Supreme, if it so Wishes (1684): 'A Strategy that Made Europe Rich'
  • Edited by Philipp Roessner
  • Translated by Keith Tribe
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    25 June 2018
  • Austria Supreme, if It So Wishes (1684) provides a scholarly introduction to the Austrian-German mercantilist classic Oesterreich über Alles Wann es Nur Will (1684) by Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk.

  • Chapter One - Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk – His Life, Times and Place in History

  • Edited by Philipp Roessner
  • Translated by Keith Tribe
  • Book:
    Austria Supreme, if it so Wishes (1684): 'A Strategy that Made Europe Rich'
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    25 June 2018, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    A Long-Forgotten Algorithm for Europe's Rise to Greatness: The Hörnigk Strategy

    How does a country grow rich? Why do some countries grow rich much faster than others? Why do some nations experience growth and prosperity, while others don't? Why did Europe eventually overtake the rest of the world, becoming the first region to industrialize and experience a progressive economic advantage over the rest of the world? These are the big questions asked in the modern social sciences, not only in more recent times (as witnessed by the post-2000 Great Divergence debate fuelled by two books by scholars working at the University of California), but also since the days of Karl Marx or Max Weber. Philipp Wilhelm von Hornigk's ‘Austria Supreme’ provides a concise and powerful answer to them. People had even raised them way before. In the eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourses, these questions were at the core of the ‘rich’ country versus ‘poor’ country debates. All major epigones of the Scottish Enlightenment, including David Hume and Adam Smith, would comment on this problem. But this discourse was even older than that. It had been raised in early modern European political economy discourse at least since the sixteenth century and the days of Giovanni Botero, the Italian author who wrote a major treatise on cities and economic development. It is not usually acknowledged that the big rift that developed in economic fortune between Asia and the West around AD 1800 had a prehistory that predates the industrial revolution – one major element and cause of the Great Divergence – by centuries. Nor is it well understood what role ideas played in this process – that is, the intellectual history of industrialization and Europe's eventual economic supremacy. With the present text, written by a seventeenth-century diplomat living in Habsburg, Austria, who no schoolchild and social science student of today would be expected to have heard of, we have an answer at last, however partial or incomplete. It was the ‘Hornigk Strategy’ that made European nations rich. Perhaps, there is something to be learned from this. At least, this man should receive the fame he deserves.

  • Chapter Five - How Europe Got Rich – The Austrian Example

  • Edited by Philipp Roessner
  • Translated by Keith Tribe
  • Book:
    Austria Supreme, if it so Wishes (1684): 'A Strategy that Made Europe Rich'
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    25 June 2018, pp 93-120

  • Summary

    State Intervention and Economic Growth in Pre-industrial Europe

    Only for reasons of analytical completeness, a brief sketch of Austrian economic policy and development is given here, mainly because Hornigk reiterated, passim and almost ad nauseam, that with ‘Oesterreich über alles’ wann es nur will, he had formulated a blueprint economic development model for the Austrian parts of the Holy Roman Empire, extending mainly, but not exclusively, to the ‘Hereditary Lands’ (Österreichische Erblande), that is lands held in hereditary possession by the Holy Roman Emperors, which at that time comprised most parts of Austria proper, Bohemia and Hungary. We have seen, however, that – contrary to the book's title, which is in many ways misleading, especially to the modern reader –, the work represents by no means a peculiar ‘Austrian’ strategy of development. Other states would – and should, in Hornigk's opinion – apply the ‘Hornigk’ strategy as well. As we have seen in the list of editions (Table 1), the first edition ever to be published within Austrian borders was the last known for the pre-industrial age: the much-amended and commented upon 1784 Vienna edition by Benedikt Franz Hermann. That means literally all known editions prior to the twentieth century were printed within the ‘German’ parts of the Holy Roman Empire. The ‘Hornigk Strategy’ therefore, was more akin to a general ‘German’, if not continental European model. It picked up on theories and practices that had been long established by the ‘Mercantilist’ states of early modern Europe and which have been masterfully surveyed in the old, but in this regard by no means out-dated, comparative study by Heckscher.

  • Chapter Two - An Age of Reason? Enlightenment and Economics

  • Edited by Philipp Roessner
  • Translated by Keith Tribe
  • Book:
    Austria Supreme, if it so Wishes (1684): 'A Strategy that Made Europe Rich'
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    25 June 2018, pp 19-28

  • Summary

    Economics Enlightened

    The concept of ‘Enlightenment’ is, of course, a treacherous one. Adorno and Habermas were neither the first nor the last to discover this. Ratio and rationality were gradually inscribed into Europe's scientific and philosophical mind map since the mid-seventeenth century, including the field of economics and political economy (which have been given far less attention by intellectual historians than other fields, such as the natural sciences). Contrary to a widely-cherished textbook notion, the eighteenth-century Physiocrats weren't the first to entertain the notion that economics should be interpreted as a science in itself, with the subject of study – the economy – being understood as a separate realm of analysis that followed its own mechanisms and ‘laws’ of motion. The Cameralists were here long before the Physiocrats, but it was the latter who drove the notion to its extreme, describing the realm of economy using the morphology of physics (which during the later nineteenth century became an even more popular analogy in the modern economic sciences). The Cameralists on the other hand (and many Mercantilists) understood the economy to be an ‘organism’, a living being (which it was and is and always has been: economics is about interaction between humans) – something for which biological analogies may be invoked, but certainly not abstract physical laws or working mechanisms. In the modern economic sciences post-1880, when the ‘Marginalist’ or Walrasian Revolution had finally taken hold, this interpretation of the economy as a physical mechanism or system (rather than a biological organism) finally teamed up with a quasi-ethical standpoint of ‘valueless-ness’ (objectivity) coupled with what would become known and cherished as the homo oeconomicus principle (rational individual with perfect overview on chances, available menu of options and ability to precisely calculate/ quantify opportunity costs, maximizing benefits at a given cost structure or, alternatively, minimizing costs in a given framework of desires).

  • Chapter Three - Cameralism–Baroque-o-nomics

  • Edited by Philipp Roessner
  • Translated by Keith Tribe
  • Book:
    Austria Supreme, if it so Wishes (1684): 'A Strategy that Made Europe Rich'
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    25 June 2018, pp 29-68

  • Summary

    Cameralist Economic Theory

    How successful the Cameralists and their theory were is indicated by the fact that ‘by the time they had disappeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, they had amassed a collective bibliography of more than 14,000 items, according to Magdalene Humpert (1937).’ And from work currently in process by former Harvard University librarian Ken Carpenter, we know that hundreds of ‘German’ cameralist texts and textbooks found their way into other languages and scientific cultures, such as Swedish and Italian. On what Cameralism was, what it represented and what – or rather how much – it contributed to the emergence and evolution of modern economics there has been perhaps more controversy than unity. Mercantilism (and Cameralism) have suffered from a series of accusations, mainly by twentieth-century scholars, that are, upon hindsight, more a reflection of academic fashion and convention than deep insight. The main charges can be summarized as follows, at the risk of oversimplification inherent to any such exercise.

  • • Mercantilist economics lacked theoretical foundation and epistemological stringency. Even eminent Marxist economic historians spoke about the theoretische Armseligkeit des Kameralismus (here they shared common ground with the liberal interpretation), or ‘Mercantilism in the service of the feudal state’ – ‘Merkantilismus des deutschen Zwergstaates.’ There was no Cameralist thinker, as the saying went in the Communist interpretation of the history of political economy, who would have matched the analytical level and rigour of the contemporary English Mercantilists. German theory remained as primitive and backword as the German economy throughout 1600–1900, it was said. Both interpretations can be challenged on the basis of more recent research.

  • • It was likewise often maintained that Mercantilism/Cameralism represented no ‘closed’ or ‘unified’ theory (usually taken to mean a theory that explains everything, that is, all types of possible economic fields and constellations, out of itself, such as Marxism or Keynesian economics).

  • • Perhaps the gravest of all charges may be the accusation that Cameralism (in the same way as Mercantilism) lacked the potential to raise general economic welfare in a Pareto-optimal way if applied as an economic policy – as though such characteristics would either be necessary or represent conditiones sine qua non, in a sense of being ultimately relevant, for determining how good or useful one particular theory really is in terms of improving the economic fate of mankind.

  • Indonesia and China's Belt and Road Initiatives: Perspectives, Issues and Prospects

  • Siwage Dharma Negara, Leo Suryadinata
  • Book:
    Indonesia and China's Belt and Road Initiatives
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    18 June 2018, pp vii-viii

  • Summary

    EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  • • For Indonesia, which is keen to accelerate its infrastructure development, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is seen as an opportunity to tap into China's huge financial resources and technological capability.

  • • There has however been no concrete BRI project agreed to between China and Indonesia so far. While China considers all projects, including infrastructure projects and economic interactions as part of BRI, Indonesia only considers those infrastructure projects initiated during the Xi Jinping period as BRI projects.

  • • Indonesia has offered several broad areas for cooperation under the BRI framework and carefully selected project locations to minimize political risk for the Joko Widodo government. But no agreements have been signed yet as China requires detailed project proposals from Indonesia, which it has apparently not received.

  • • What appears to hamper progress are four key issues: the perception of China's economic domination, the ethnic Chinese issue, the Natuna issue, and the mainland Chinese workers issue.

Indonesia and China's Belt and Road Initiatives
  • Perspectives, Issues and Prospects
  • Siwage Dharma Negara, Leo Suryadinata
  • Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    18 June 2018
  • For Indonesia, which is keen to accelerate its infrastructure development, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is seen as an opportunity to tap into China's huge financial resources and technological capability. There has however been no concrete BRI project agreed to between China and Indonesia so far. While China considers all projects, including infrastructure projects and economic interactions as part of BRI, Indonesia only considers those infrastructure projects initiated during the Xi Jinping period as BRI projects. Indonesia has offered several broad areas for cooperation under the BRI framework and carefully selected project locations to minimize political risk for the Joko Widodo government. But no agreements have been signed yet as China requires detailed project proposals from Indonesia, which it has apparently not received. What appears to hamper progress are four key issues: the perception of China's economic domination, the ethnic Chinese issue, the Natuna issue, and the mainland Chinese workers issue.

  • Indonesia and China's Belt and Road Initiatives: Perspectives, Issues and Prospects

  • Siwage Dharma Negara, Leo Suryadinata
  • Book:
    Indonesia and China's Belt and Road Initiatives
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    18 June 2018, pp 1-41

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was first introduced by Chinese President Xi Jinping in October 2013. Initially, the proposal offers cooperation in infrastructure development covering the overland “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the sea-based “Maritime Silk Road”. Later the proposal has been extended to also cover non-infrastructure investment, including cultural ties and people-to-people exchanges. In recent years, BRI has become China's global banner for promoting its international position as the leader of open economic cooperation.

    For developing countries that are keen to accelerate their economic development, BRI is seen as an opportunity to tap into China's huge financial resources and technological capability. Specifically, for Indonesia, a country that is currently embarking on massive infrastructure development, BRI is considered a good alternative financing source. In fact, Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, was among the seven heads of state from ASEAN to attend the inaugural BRI Forum in May 2017. Jokowi mentioned then that he wanted to see how Indonesia could benefit from BRI cooperation, and after the BRI forum, Indonesia proposed a list of projects for cooperation under BRI.

    Despite this interest to participate in BRI, however, there is as yet no concrete BRI project agreed to between China and Indonesia. Also, both countries have different perceptions on what BRI projects are. While China considers all projects, including infrastructure projects and economic interactions as BRI projects, Indonesia only sees infrastructure projects started during the Xi Jinping period to be such. Since China perceives BRI cooperation as a totality of China–Indonesia economic interactions, this paper's discussion also touches on China's trade, investments, loans and tourism in/with Indonesia in order to provide a more complete picture.

    While there have been a large number of analyses with regard to BRI, including its potential geopolitics and geostrategic impacts on countries along the belt route, there is not much analysis regarding how the countries in the maritime silk route perceive BRI. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining how different stakeholders (state, business, media and society) perceive BRI. It explains Indonesia's key interests in BRI cooperation, describes the proposals from Indonesia, and assesses how BRI cooperation will affect relations between the two countries.

  • Foreword

  • Siwage Dharma Negara, Leo Suryadinata
  • Book:
    Indonesia and China's Belt and Road Initiatives
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    18 June 2018, pp v-vi

  • Summary

    The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

    The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

    The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

Page 66 of 298