A BRIEF DESCRIPTION ON THE ROLE OF BATIK IN INDOSESIA 1 The Role in Trading Sector.

Ripayandi David AJP : A Brief Description On The Role Of Batik For Indonesian Society, 2009. iv 3. A BRIEF DESCRIPTION ON THE ROLE OF BATIK IN INDOSESIA 3.1 The Role in Trading Sector. Known to anthropologists and naturalists as “The Malay Archipelago”, Indonesia archipelago has 13,667 islands strewn across 5,120 kms of tropical seas. The array of peoples, languages, customs, and material cultures is astounding for living here are over hundred distinct ethnic groups, each with its own cultural identity, who together speak a total of more 300 mutually unintelligible languages. Indonesian culture has a long history and was syncretically formed through the cultural influences of Hindu, Buddhism, Islam as well as Dutch colonialism. Among five main islands Sumatera, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Papua, the island of Java formed a chain of ports on the trade routes between the Middle East, India, and China for many centuries. Indonesia has set forth the development objective for the industrial sector as its structural reforms through accelerated growth, increased added value, creation of employment opportunities and export promotion. To achieve the target growths, one of the following policies is to strengthening of small and medium- sized enterprises, including the promotion of community industries producing craft product. It is expected to play an important role in the development of lagging regions. During the last two decades small firms in developing countries have received more and more attention from researchers and policy makers. For this, several reasons have been brought forward. The decline in labour absorption in agriculture and the slow growth of employment opportunities in the other sectors Ripayandi David AJP : A Brief Description On The Role Of Batik For Indonesian Society, 2009. iv of the economy, combined with the fact that the growth of the labour force has accelerated, have led to un- and under-employment problems in many of these countries. Small firms are generally viewed as a useful means of alleviating these problems, because medium and large firms only would not help to solve the problems. However, from this study it can be concluded that the medium and large firms in the manufacturing sector in Indonesia are doing better in employment and income than generally anticipated. The demand for batik products can be categorized into two types of products. The first is that demand batik products handmade and printed batik that will be used as raw material of convection industry which is further processed into ready made-wear. The second is the demand for batik products of ready to wear type in the forms of scarves, sarongs, and so on. The sources of the demand itself consists of local domestic market and the demand coming from export market.

1. Domestic Demand