About the APINDOs Business Competitiveness

B. About the APINDOs Business Competitiveness

Survey The APINDOs business competitiveness survey is conducted in two simultaneously ways: face-to-face interview and online survey. The survey managed to get 106 respondents that are located in 4 major business districts in Indonesia, namely: Medan, Greater Jakarta Jabodetabek, Semarang, and Surabaya. Most of the respondents are the key industry players that operate almost in all regions in Indonesia, from Sumatera to Papua. Therefore, this survey is arguably representative enough to sort of peeling out major problems impeding business growth and to having overall view about the recent business competitiveness in relative with other major competitors of Indonesia, especially in major developing Asia countries. Apart from the general questions asking about major impediments to business, one of the major features of this survey is that it asked the respondents to score out Indonesias competitiveness level as compared to other developing Asia countries as our proxy of Indonesias major competitors. The argument is that competitiveness should not be measured in an absolute-independent term, but it should also be measured in a relative to other countries: how good Indonesia is comparing to other comparable countries. To get a sense of how to improving business competitiveness and invite export-oriented irm to invest and produce in Indonesia, we have to know deeper about Indonesias relative strengths and w e a k n e s s e s a s c o m p a r e d t o o t h e r competitors, so that we can have a more solid evidence on what should be in the policy prioritization for improvement. Other major feature of this survey is that it contains special focus to employment policy, logistics, and infrastructure situation in Indonesia, and to some extent also a closer look at the regional level. The argument of having these special focuses is that these are the elements that score rather poorly in s eve ra l gl o b a l s u r vey, e . g . G l o b a l Competitiveness Index GCI, Enabling Trade Index, Doing Business, etc. For instance, Indonesias labor market ef iciency ranks very poorly in the GCI 2014- th 2015 that is 110 out of 144 countries WEF 2014. Indonesia, though improving, still ranks below Malaysia and Thailand in Ease of Doing Business Index, in term of “trading across border”, which implies the need for further boosting up trade logistics and infrastructure development in Indonesia. This study wants to dig and evaluate these problems deeper by inding more profound evidence and putting more local context to it, where possible. The survey was conducted from October to November 2014; the highly political period yet at the same time the period where business expectation is among the highest as compared to other period. The survey is done within this period in a hope that respondents will have greater willingness to ill in the questionnaire, noting that this is the right moment to communicate a policy change to the newly elect government, at the time where the political capital is still high. An appendix is devoted to explain more about the distribution of the survey re s p o n d e n t s a n d s t r u c t u re o f t h e questionnaire. 5 STRENGTHENING BUSINESS COMPETITIVENESS FOR A PROSPEROUS INDONESIA

C. I n d o n e s i a s B u s i n e s s Environment 2014