Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T14:30:06.388Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Indonesia's New Prominence in the World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2015

Anthony Reid
Affiliation:
Australian National University (ANU)
Get access

Summary

‘GOODBYE CHINA, HELLO INDONESIA’?

Surprising as it sounds to cynical Indonesians and disillusioned Indonesianists, there are reasons for thinking that this is at last Indonesia's moment on the world stage. The world's fourth-biggest country by population has an unenviable reputation for not living up to expectations, epitomized by the subtitle of Anne Booth's economic history of Indonesia: ‘A history of missed opportunities’ (Booth 1998). She traced over almost two centuries a sequence of hopeful new beginnings followed by disappointments, leaving Indonesia one of the world's poorest and most conflicted countries in the 1960s. As other Asian tiger economies leapt ahead in the latter part of the twentieth century, Indonesia also grew, but failed to close the gap with its neighbours. In 1998 the Asian financial crisis caused a 13 per cent drop in GDP, and an IMF bullying of the Suharto government into taking the kind of stern medicine that helped precipitate its fall.

Yet now we have international pundits declaring that Indonesia is the future. The influential US journal Foreign Policy used the heading ‘The Indonesian tiger’ for a story proclaiming the country the quiet achiever of the moment (Keating 2010). Much quoted NYU Stern School economist Nouriel Roubini, known as ‘Dr Doom’ for his forecasting of global financial crisis and especially a coming crash in China, went further. In a speech reported under the heading ‘Roubini: goodbye China, hello Indonesia’, he noted that China's growth rate was falling while Indonesia's was rising (6.1 per cent in 2010, 6.3 per cent in 2011, 6.5 per cent expected in 2012). He argued moreover that Indonesia had the right model to sustain growth, with its low inflation, low debt (about 26 per cent of GDP), young demographics, and the insulation provided by two-thirds of its GDP being derived from domestic consumption. It therefore stood a better chance than China, let alone the developed world, of long-term growth even in the hard times he expected the world to face (Deutsch 2011). Indonesia's admission to the G20 club of influential states seems no more than its due in light of such predictions.

Type
Chapter
Information
Indonesia Rising
The Repositioning of Asia's Third Giant
, pp. 1 - 13
Publisher: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×