1.00 To Output and Input

competitive advantage indicators. The unit of investment spent to feedlot industry in Lampung give greater benefit than in Banten and West Java. They are benefited with low domestic factor cost such as land, building, machinery, and feeder cattle. Therefore, existing policy should be maintained. c. Feedlots in West Java spent the largest feed cost among all which affecting their overall profitability. Feedlots used a huge amount of high cost concentrate. An alternative high protein sources from industrial by product will help to reduce this expense. Thus, government could help the feedlots through establishing partnership program of which they can utilize cheaper feed cost from by-product. 4. The exchange rate change gave a little impact to the comparative advantage of the industry, as long as the domestic component is dominating production activity. Limitations Despite covering three key area of beef industry, this study could not be generalized as a whole of Indonesian feedlots competitiveness. One of the main reasons is that the other 30 provinces may have allocate their resource for another commodity, each feedlot has different production efficiency, or having a different regional policy which may also affect industry’s comparative and competitive advantage. The composition of import and local feeder for each feedlot is unknown so it is hard to distinguish whether the comparative and competitive advantage is from the imported or local cattle. The data is yearly basis, not per period of production while each feedlot could operates in different production frequency for each year. Thus, it might not reveal the true level of competitiveness of feedlot industries in Indonesia. Moreover, most of the variables in the input and output costs are approached through aggregate measurement. To this extent, the source of profitability or divergence becomes imprecise. For instance, medicines used are classified into biological, pharmaceutical, and premix. The unit of measurement and information about the kind of each medicine category is unknown. Thus, the assessment of medicine cost is the expenditure on medicine per head of cattle basis and might not reflect the absolute cost. As for capital, life-span estimation of machinery and equipment did not employed in the research due to the missing information. Another issue is related to the distribution cost. In general, the distribution cost covers all the payment from port to feedlot and from feedlot to market, i.e. Loading-unloading cost, quarantine cost, expedition cost, retribution of abattoir, fuel consumption, import license cost, etc. This research only taken into account the expedition cost and government retribution cost along the supply chain. As it was only rough estimation, the cost might be higher or lower. Last but not least, the data exploration in the fields will be beneficial to give deeper analysis of competitiveness sources and more update data about the feedlot industry. However, due to personal constraint, the information in this research were mainly secondary data from 2011 and approached through literature investigation. These limitations open up further research suggestion, including the