Manajemen | Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji 00074910215536
Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
Book Reviews
To cite this article: (2002) Book Reviews, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 38:3,
403-410, DOI: 10.1080/00074910215536
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074910215536
Published online: 17 Jun 2010.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 21
View related articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cbie20
Download by: [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji]
Date: 19 January 2016, At: 20:27
Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2002: 403–10
BOOK REVIEWS
Downloaded by [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji] at 20:27 19 January 2016
Michael R. Godley and Grayson J. Lloyd (eds) (2001), Perspectives on the Chinese
Indonesians, Crawford House Publishing, Adelaide, pp. xxiii + 388. A$49.95.
The papers in this volume were presented at a conference at the Australian
National University in February 1999,
within months of the tragedy that befell
the Chinese Indonesians on 13–15 May
1998. The list of authors reminds us how
many Indonesian specialists there are in
Australia and how closely Indonesian
scholars, officials and journalists have
worked with them. That is why it was
possible to bring those who know the
Chinese Indonesian question well so
quickly together to share their thoughts
on that tragedy. And remarkably, for all
the sadness and regret that underlay
each of the papers, the authors have written them with cool reasoning. There is
barely suppressed passion and anger
here and there, but the genuine desire
to understand and explain is largely in
control.
The editors have done well to knit the
20 papers into a cohesive discussion of
the major issues behind the riots, the
burning, the looting and the rapes. This
is followed by a 37-page chronology of
events, a 28-page appendix summarising
the main anti-Chinese actions of the New
Order government, and a second appendix of 28 pages giving the executive summary of the final report of the Joint
Fact-finding Team on the Riots. In this
way, we have been provided with the
fullest account available so far of what
happened.
The many perspectives offered in this
volume reflect the different expertise of
the authors. They range from those who
point to the policies of the Soeharto government as the ultimate cause of the
tragedy to those who stress the broader
economic origins of racial tensions. Others seek explanations in the history of
competition and conflict rooted in the
Netherlands East Indies. Yet others look
for a variety of cultural and social factors that seem to make continuous suspicion and resentment between the
pribumi (indigenous Indonesians) and
their Chinese fellow citizens, or between
some Muslim groups and other religious
communities, almost inevitable. In all
the efforts to explain, the various authors
grapple with the larger issue of whether
this tragedy was part of something dark
and frightening that has gradually become the norm, or whether it is an extreme manifestation of the painfu l
process of building a united and democratic nation. Three papers compare Indonesia directly with Malaysia and Fiji,
but in fact all the papers implicitly contrast what happened in Indonesia in
May 1998 with what is more normal
elsewhere. And there is a general agreement that the tragedy marked a great
setback for the country.
As a record of the first responses of
those who study Indonesia closely, this
is a valuable collection. The authors
cannot be faulted for being unable to
agree on what can be done to prevent
such tragedies from happening again.
The families of the victims may not be
ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/02/030403-8
© 2002 Indonesia Project ANU
Downloaded by [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji] at 20:27 19 January 2016
404
totally satisfied by the rationality in the
arguments offered, but they will have
to admit that the essays represent heartsearching attempts to get at some of the
truth available so soon after the event.
Future scholars will do better. When
they embark on a more thorough examination of all the relevant documents pertaining to the riots, they will be able to
place these events in a larger and much
more complex frame. The most obvious
would include the Asian financial crisis
that accelerated the fall of the Soeharto
regime, and the immense threat those
two entwined events came to pose to the
integrity of Indonesia as a unitary state.
It would also encompass the explosive
drive among young Indonesians towards participatory democracy. It may
also become clearer by then how much
most Chinese Indonesians had tried to
assimilate and contribute to the national
economy. Not least, future studies
would have to weigh the contributions
of the new middle and professional
classes, notably the embattled roles
Book Reviews
played by journalists, scholars and students in an increasingly militarised regime. But if they wish to understand
where the anti-Chinese riots stand in
that larger picture, they will need to begin with this book.
A mbassador Wiryono Sastrohandoyo’s introduction sets out to correct one misperception and makes a
moving appeal. He decries the alarming notion that the Chinese Indonesians
control 75% of the country’s wealth,
and quotes figures to suggest that their
control is closer to 10%. Although this
is not confirmed, it is certainly politically helpful to the Chinese Indonesian
image. He ends with what I believe
most educated pribumi want to see, affirming that ‘We, the people of Indonesia …’, the opening words of the
Proclamation of Independence on 17
August 1945, was meant to include all
Chinese Indonesians.
Wang Gungwu
National University of Singapore
Mohamad Ikhsan, Chris Manning and Hadi Soesastro (eds) (2002), 80 Tahun
Mohamad Sadli: Ekonomi Indonesia di Era Politik Baru [Mohamad Sadli’s 80 Years:
The Indonesian Economy in the New Political Era], Penerbit Buku Kompas, Jakarta,
pp. xxi + 423.
This volume was produced as a festschrift to celebrate the 80th birthday of
Mohamad Sadli, a founding member of
the ‘Berkeley Mafia’, the group of economic ‘technocrats’ who ran the Indonesian economy so successfully during
much of the New Order regime. Sadli
held a series of important ministerial
posts and, since his resignation as Minister for Mines in 1978, has remained an
active, perceptive and tireless commentator on the economy and society at
large.
This long and active involvement is
reflected in the eclectic works of the 40
or so contributors (foreigners and Indonesians, roughly evenly split between
those writing in Indonesian and those
writing in English). Some have produced bespoke purpose-built pieces for
this volume, while others have drawn
on their regular specialisations. The first
group—those directed specifically at
Sadli and his contribution—universally
record, with admiration and warm affection, the benefits they have received
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Book Reviews
from knowing Sadli. His facility with the
pen—the ability to master an issue and
then write about it in an accessible
way—is a common theme. These articles capture not just the wide-ranging
and often iconoclastic contributions that
Sadli made to policy and commentary
over such a long period, but the impish
charm and wit that has made him so
universally liked. The contributions include delightfully light-hearted reminiscences about Sadli, and some amusing
photos. The one regret here is that we
are none the wiser about the reasons that
took him out of the immediate circle of
the policy making ‘technocrats’, to the
more distant commentator’s role.
The other contributions range across
the full spectrum of the economy and
the issues facing Indonesia: macroeconomic questions; microeconomic issues and decentralisation (three separate
contributions on this vital topic); social,
poverty and income distribution issues;
political economy and globalisation. Just
about all of the Big Issues are covered
here: the problems of the budget, where
tax revenues are still low by international standards and interest payments
on government debt are large; regionalism and what that implies for economic
management; the role of the state, and
in particular state ownership of enterprises; two contrasting pieces on the role
of the central bank, from different but
knowledgeable viewpoints; a wideranging piece by the former Bank Indonesia governor; and ‘from-the-trenches’
reporting of policy under three presidents, by the current Minister of Finance
[see the article by Dr Boediono reproduced in this issue]. Sometimes the
opportunity is used to take a personal
hobby-horse for a canter, and in one or
two cases old material has been pressed
405
into service. But all of the contributors
recognise that an era has come to an end
for Indonesia. And none sees democracy—whatever its virtues—as making
the task of running the economy any
easier, with ‘implementation in the
hands of a vastly weaker and less focussed government’ (Bresnan). The political scientists among the contributors
are more enthusiastic about the prospects, after the lean years (from their
perspective) of the Soeharto era. Judgments on these years are not the central
issue here, although it might be worth
noting the range of views, with
McCawley referring to ‘the remarkable
man who was the second President of
the Republic of Indonesia’, while for
Bresnan ‘the principal cause of the depth
of their country’s suffering was an autocratic and corrupt President’.
We know that Sadli can talk and
write; we learn that he can listen as
well—one of the charming anecdotes
recorded here concerns the criticism
that, in all his writing over 30 years, he
had never addressed the issue of gender. Faced by this lightly put but pointed
accusation, he responded that there was
a division of labour in the family, with
his wife looking after these issues. But
within a month he had, himself, addressed the topic in one of his columns.
The diversity of the contributions and
their wide range reflects the eclectic interests of Sadli himself. This volume
brings together current thinking on the
range of the issues Indonesia is facing,
and is a fitting tribute to the ‘public intellectual at large’. The editors pose the
obvious question: ‘where are the new
Sadlis?’.
Stephen Grenville
Sydney and ANU
406
Book Reviews
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Daniel Fitzpatrick (2002), Land Claims in East Timor, Asia Pacific Press, Canberra,
pp. 246. A$40.00.
The appearance of Daniel Fitzpatrick’s
book in mid 2002 is timely, accompanying the independence of the tiny country from the UN Transitional Authority
for East Timor (UNTAET). This wellresearched volume systematically explores the main land issues, providing
comprehensive background and focusing on the many conflicting claims and
on routes to resolving them.
The first chapter vividly recalls for
those of us near the events described the
traumas and tragedies of the Indonesian
occupation and its aftermath. It notes
some horrifying incidents, including the
displacement from their land of threequarters of the Timorese peoples, the final widespread destruction of buildings
and other infrastructures by the departing militia and Indonesian forces, and
the burning of all land titles offices and
most records. It points as well to the failure of UNTAET under pressure from the
new national cabinet to provide for private land administration, resulting in
legal uncertainty, lack of public housing and deterrence to private investors.
Then in subsequent chapters the book
turns to topics pertinent to understanding and solving the difficult and complex land problems of East Timor. It
addresses the traditional relations of
people to land, showing how various
societal and governmental arrangements have regulated land use. It
scrutinises key questions surrounding
land claims based on Indonesian titles,
looking in depth at these titles and their
administration. It reviews claims to land
based on Portuguese-era titles, describing the nature of the latter and their status under Indonesian rule. It goes on to
discuss claims based on traditional
rights, finally presenting options for resolving land claims in East Timor.
While Sir Gerard Brennan states in his
Foreword that ‘East Timor begins its life
as a new and independent nation without the benefit of established laws and
institutions to regulate land’ (p. ix), the
book illustrates how the country is actually endowed with many laws governing land use. These laws comprise not
only traditional arrangements stemming
from the past but also the remnants of
systems established by colonial occupiers. The difficulties are to reconcile these
different approaches in light of competing claims and accompanying political
demands. Fitzpatrick valiantly attempts
to indicate ways out of these problems,
interestinglyreferring to how other countries in similar circumstances have tried
to solve their own land use dilemmas.
The author refreshingly argues that
traditional rights to land should be
broadly recognised in East Timor. This
is a key recommendation, and bases the
resolution of land claims on the most
widely accepted and inherently flexible
land use system. He also subscribes
heavily, in relation to rural and urban
lands, to the idea of ‘tenure reform’
rather than ‘land distribution’. He recommends, for instance, that smallholders wh o re-occu pied former
Portuguese and Indonesian plantations
in East Timor ‘may receive formal
rights under a program of tenure reform’, where these rights ‘arise either
from traditional connections to the
land, or possibly from occupation for
… 12 or more years’ (p. 149). But in
other cases where titles issued by
former authorities may reasonably be
recognised, he argues in favour of that.
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Book Reviews
Fitzpatrick is manifestly conscious of
the high costs of revamping land use
systems and of complications arising
from attendant political considerations.
This is under circumstances where progressive reform is likely to be more feasible than wholesale alteration. In the
case of customary tenure he cautions
against a ‘minimalist’ and noninterventionist approach to adjustment,
suggesting, on the reform principle,
that there should be a ‘three-tier system of conflict resolution’. That would
entail resort to ‘traditional processes,
then mediation and, failing that, judicial determination’ (p. 176), perhaps
modelled on the land court system of
Papua New Guinea.
As well as pursuing its main themes,
the book records many associated aspects
of great interest. It describes, for example,
the concern of Fretilin, the leading party
of the revolution and independence,with
‘land justice for traditional and/or dispossessed groups’ and with implementing land reform (p. 16). This concern and
the underlying political pressures from
it seem likely to influence future land
policies critically. The book also recounts
the ‘corrupt’ securing of titles by Indonesian ‘cronies’ and military interests, including the now retired generals Benny
Moerdani and Dading Kalbuadi, who
operated through a trading company, PT
407
Depok Hernandes International. This
company ‘quickly took over all smallholder and SAPT [a Portuguese public
company] coffee plantations in Ermera’
following the Indonesian invasion in
1975, and ‘was also given an exclusive
licence over all buying, selling and transporting of coffee in East Timor’. These
and numerous other inclusions add
valuable flavour, and serve to enhance
understanding of the volume’s central
questions.
The book is especially valuable in comprehensively documenting current East
Timorese land problems and accompanying political events and pressures. It
valiantly tackles the hard task of indicating solutions to these problems, doing
this partly in sections dealing with specific types of claim, and partly in a disappointingly brief closing chapter. Such
resolution is indeed a big problem in the
future development of East Timor, and
more extended discussions of it will be
welcome. That is especially so for those
in East Timor undertaking the weighty
tasks of formulating land policies and
resolving land claims. But Fitzpatrick has
made an excellent beginning, and it is
hoped he will follow this up with further
analyses.
Colin Barlow
Wolfson College, Oxford
Piter Abdullah, Armida S. Alisjahbana, Nury Effendi and Boediono (2002), Daya
Saing Daerah: Konsep dan Pengukurannya di Indonesia [The Competitiveness of Regions: Concepts and Measurement in Indonesia], Pusat Pendidikan dan Studi
Kebanksentralan, Bank Indonesia [Centre for Central Banking Studies and Training, Bank Indonesia], BPFE-Yogyakarta, pp. x + 354.
This book ‘attempts to contribute to an
understanding of the competitiveness
of regions in Indonesia from both a conceptual and a measurement perspec-
tive’. The approach it takes is to rank
all provinces on each of a very large
number of variables (nearly 200 in all)
that are presumed to be indicative of
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408
their relative competitiveness. These
variables are of two kinds: first, published data from a variety of sources
that are available on a provincial basis;
and second, survey data that reveal perceptions about doing business in each
province. The authors derive an overall ranking of all the provinces’ ‘competitiveness’, which seems to be based
(though this is not clear) on the sum of
each province’s rankings in relation to
each of these variables.
The book has some usefulness as a
compendium of economic data arranged
by province, even though the presentation is by no means ‘user friendly’. Unfortunately, however, a very large
proportion of the variables presented
appear to have little if anything to do
with competitiveness. Consider a small
selection of the indicators that collectively are assumed to enable the reader
to conclude that province X is ‘more
competitive’ than province Y: the Gini
coefficient (an indicator of income inequality); life expectancy; the share of
urban area in total land area of the province (a high value of which presumably
does little for the competitiveness of
agricultural pursuits); the reliance on
rivers to transport goods (a high ranking here seems to be taken as a positive
contributor to ‘competitiveness’!); the
ratio of the length of railway lines to
total land area; the average wage in
manufacturing (a high value of which
presumably does little for the competitiveness of labour-intensive manufacturing); and so on. There is little attempt to
justify the inclusion of these diverse indicators, so we have no way of knowing how the authors rationalise their
often perplexing choices.
A province’s ‘competitiveness’, in the
sense of the ease or difficulty of doing
business there, needs to be carefully distinguished from the ease or difficulty of
Book Reviews
producing particular goods and services
within each province. For example, the
observation that Irian Jaya has about
7,000 times as much productive forest
as DKI Jakarta (the Jakarta Capital Region) certainly suggests that the former
will enjoy a competitive advantage in
producing logs, but it tells us nothing
whatsoever about the relative ease of
doing business in general in these two
provinces.
This kind of study is potentially useful to policy makers, provided that it
focuses clearly (though not exclusively)
on aspects of doing business that are
under their control—such as whether it
is easy to obtain a licence to establish a
new business or to carry on normal business activity without excessive bureaucratic interference, or whether public
sector infrastructure is adequate. Some
of the survey data do relate to these
kinds of issues, but there is often hardly
any difference in the survey results
across provinces except, perhaps, for a
small number of outliers in each case. A
weakness of the study is that there is no
statistical testing to determine whether
the rankings based on such variables are
correlated or randomly distributed.
A final comment: it is difficult to understand why Indonesia’s central bank
would allocate its resources to a research project that has nothing whatsoever to do with central banking. Bank
Indonesia’s major functions are to control the value of the rupiah and to maintain the integrity of the banking system,
and it has had enormous difficulties
with both over the last five years. One
would have thought all of its intellectual energy would now be devoted to
understanding what went wrong, and
how to avoid a repetition.
Ross H. McLeod
ANU
Book Reviews
409
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Takahiro Akita and Yoichi Nakamura (eds) (2000), Green GDP Estimates in China,
Indonesia, and Japan: An Application of the UN Environmental and Economic Accounting System, United Nations University (UNU/IAS), Tokyo, pp. 109. US$10.00; ¥500.
This report discusses the System of Integrated Environmental and Economic
Accounting (SEEA), and uses it to estimate ‘Green GDP’ for Japan, Indonesia
and China. The SEEA inserts an environmental account into the traditional
System of National Accounts (SNA)
used to calculate Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Thus Green GDP, also known
as Eco Domestic Product, is a correction
to GDP that takes account of the cost of
natural resource depletion and environmental degradation.
The first part of the report contrasts
the SEEA with the National Accounting
Matrix including Environmental Accounts (NAMEA), which is an extension
of a social accounting matrix (SAM) that
includes flow accounts relating to natural resources. The report argues that the
main difference between the NAMEA
and the SEEA is that the flow accounts
for natural resources in the former are
presented only in physical units,
whereas in the SEEA they are expressed
in monetary units (p. 1). It would have
been helpful if the report had briefly
elaborated the nature of the SAM and
the SNA, and then made it clear that the
NAMEA and the SEEA are two very
different accounting systems, developed
for different purposes. The NAMEA was
devised to observe and account in detail for flows of natural resources, thus
providing a more complete social accounting matrix, while the SEEA was
developed purely to bring environmental aspects into the measure of GDP. It
should also be noted that there is a class
of the NAMEA, the Social and Environmental Accounting Matrix (SEAM), that
does in fact present pollution flow mea-
sures in monetary units (Resosudarmo
and Thorbecke 1996, 1998).
The second part of the book describes
the SEEA in detail. After explaining the
structure of the SNA, it sets out the steps
needed to calculate Net Domestic Product (NDP), i.e. GDP minus consumption
of produced fixed capital or assets such
as buildings, roads and machinery, and
of cultivated assets such as livestock and
plantations. Green GDP is NDP minus
the imputed environmental costs of operating the economy. There are two
sources of such costs: the consumption
of non-produced (natural) economic assets, such as oil, gas and coal reserves;
and the degradation of non-produced
non-economic assets, such as air and
water. The presentation would have
benefited from the provision of a list of
abbreviations for variables, a brief explanation of the meaning of each technical term, and a list of equations
showing the relationships between variables. Someone unfamiliar with the SNA
would have had to wait until the third
part of the report to understand the
meanings of the variables mentioned
here.
The last part reports on the application of the SEEA to Japan, China and
Indonesia. In estimating the cost of degradation or depletion of non-produced
natural assets, only three cases are covered. The first is the degradation of air
and water quality. The measures of air
quality are levels of SO X (sulphur oxide) and NOX (nitrogen oxide) pollutants for Japan and Indonesia, and SOX
and TSP (total suspended particles) for
China. The measures of water quality
are levels of BOD (biological oxygen de-
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410
mand), COD (chemical oxygen demand) and pollutants such as nitrate
and phosphorus for Japan, and levels
of BOD and COD for Indonesia. No
water quality indicators are considered
for China. The second case is the destruction of the ecosystem in forests and
other land types. The third is the depletion of subsoil resources such as oil, gas
and coal.
While at this stage lack of data makes
it impractical to build an accounting system that covers all pollution problems
and all cases of natural resource depletion, there is still a need to justify the
inclusion or exclusion of particular pollutants or cases of natural resource
depletion in the accounts, but this has
not been done here. For air pollution, for
example, the SEEA for Indonesia covers only SO X and NOX, yet studies have
shown that PM 10 (Particulate Matter
with a diameter of 10 micrometres or
less) creates greater health problems
Book Reviews
than either of these, and data on PM10
are available for Indonesia. In relation
to water pollution, it is not clear whether
the SEEA for China and Indonesia covers both ground and surface water pollution: if only the latter is covered, does
this mean that data on ground water
pollution are not available, or that the
problem is trivial in those countries?
Another important omission is the case
of marine resource depletion, which is
very important for Indonesia, at least.
Despite these criticisms, the report
can be recommended to those who work
on SNA, and the authors are to be congratulated for their contribution to the
literature. Readers can learn much about
the kinds of data that are available, and
how the environmental cost of economic
activity can be estimated when relevant
information is very limited.
Budy P. Resosudarmo
ANU
References
Resosudarmo, B.P., and E. Thorbecke (1996),
‘The Impact of Environmental Policies on
Household Incomes for Different SocioEconomic Classes: The Case of Air Pollutants in Indonesia’, Ecological Economics
17: 83–94.
Resosudarmo, B.P., and E. Thorbecke (1998),
‘Reducing the Number of Pesticide Related Illnesses: The Impact on Households
in Indonesia’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 34 (2): 143–57.
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
Book Reviews
To cite this article: (2002) Book Reviews, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 38:3,
403-410, DOI: 10.1080/00074910215536
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074910215536
Published online: 17 Jun 2010.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 21
View related articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cbie20
Download by: [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji]
Date: 19 January 2016, At: 20:27
Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2002: 403–10
BOOK REVIEWS
Downloaded by [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji] at 20:27 19 January 2016
Michael R. Godley and Grayson J. Lloyd (eds) (2001), Perspectives on the Chinese
Indonesians, Crawford House Publishing, Adelaide, pp. xxiii + 388. A$49.95.
The papers in this volume were presented at a conference at the Australian
National University in February 1999,
within months of the tragedy that befell
the Chinese Indonesians on 13–15 May
1998. The list of authors reminds us how
many Indonesian specialists there are in
Australia and how closely Indonesian
scholars, officials and journalists have
worked with them. That is why it was
possible to bring those who know the
Chinese Indonesian question well so
quickly together to share their thoughts
on that tragedy. And remarkably, for all
the sadness and regret that underlay
each of the papers, the authors have written them with cool reasoning. There is
barely suppressed passion and anger
here and there, but the genuine desire
to understand and explain is largely in
control.
The editors have done well to knit the
20 papers into a cohesive discussion of
the major issues behind the riots, the
burning, the looting and the rapes. This
is followed by a 37-page chronology of
events, a 28-page appendix summarising
the main anti-Chinese actions of the New
Order government, and a second appendix of 28 pages giving the executive summary of the final report of the Joint
Fact-finding Team on the Riots. In this
way, we have been provided with the
fullest account available so far of what
happened.
The many perspectives offered in this
volume reflect the different expertise of
the authors. They range from those who
point to the policies of the Soeharto government as the ultimate cause of the
tragedy to those who stress the broader
economic origins of racial tensions. Others seek explanations in the history of
competition and conflict rooted in the
Netherlands East Indies. Yet others look
for a variety of cultural and social factors that seem to make continuous suspicion and resentment between the
pribumi (indigenous Indonesians) and
their Chinese fellow citizens, or between
some Muslim groups and other religious
communities, almost inevitable. In all
the efforts to explain, the various authors
grapple with the larger issue of whether
this tragedy was part of something dark
and frightening that has gradually become the norm, or whether it is an extreme manifestation of the painfu l
process of building a united and democratic nation. Three papers compare Indonesia directly with Malaysia and Fiji,
but in fact all the papers implicitly contrast what happened in Indonesia in
May 1998 with what is more normal
elsewhere. And there is a general agreement that the tragedy marked a great
setback for the country.
As a record of the first responses of
those who study Indonesia closely, this
is a valuable collection. The authors
cannot be faulted for being unable to
agree on what can be done to prevent
such tragedies from happening again.
The families of the victims may not be
ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/02/030403-8
© 2002 Indonesia Project ANU
Downloaded by [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji] at 20:27 19 January 2016
404
totally satisfied by the rationality in the
arguments offered, but they will have
to admit that the essays represent heartsearching attempts to get at some of the
truth available so soon after the event.
Future scholars will do better. When
they embark on a more thorough examination of all the relevant documents pertaining to the riots, they will be able to
place these events in a larger and much
more complex frame. The most obvious
would include the Asian financial crisis
that accelerated the fall of the Soeharto
regime, and the immense threat those
two entwined events came to pose to the
integrity of Indonesia as a unitary state.
It would also encompass the explosive
drive among young Indonesians towards participatory democracy. It may
also become clearer by then how much
most Chinese Indonesians had tried to
assimilate and contribute to the national
economy. Not least, future studies
would have to weigh the contributions
of the new middle and professional
classes, notably the embattled roles
Book Reviews
played by journalists, scholars and students in an increasingly militarised regime. But if they wish to understand
where the anti-Chinese riots stand in
that larger picture, they will need to begin with this book.
A mbassador Wiryono Sastrohandoyo’s introduction sets out to correct one misperception and makes a
moving appeal. He decries the alarming notion that the Chinese Indonesians
control 75% of the country’s wealth,
and quotes figures to suggest that their
control is closer to 10%. Although this
is not confirmed, it is certainly politically helpful to the Chinese Indonesian
image. He ends with what I believe
most educated pribumi want to see, affirming that ‘We, the people of Indonesia …’, the opening words of the
Proclamation of Independence on 17
August 1945, was meant to include all
Chinese Indonesians.
Wang Gungwu
National University of Singapore
Mohamad Ikhsan, Chris Manning and Hadi Soesastro (eds) (2002), 80 Tahun
Mohamad Sadli: Ekonomi Indonesia di Era Politik Baru [Mohamad Sadli’s 80 Years:
The Indonesian Economy in the New Political Era], Penerbit Buku Kompas, Jakarta,
pp. xxi + 423.
This volume was produced as a festschrift to celebrate the 80th birthday of
Mohamad Sadli, a founding member of
the ‘Berkeley Mafia’, the group of economic ‘technocrats’ who ran the Indonesian economy so successfully during
much of the New Order regime. Sadli
held a series of important ministerial
posts and, since his resignation as Minister for Mines in 1978, has remained an
active, perceptive and tireless commentator on the economy and society at
large.
This long and active involvement is
reflected in the eclectic works of the 40
or so contributors (foreigners and Indonesians, roughly evenly split between
those writing in Indonesian and those
writing in English). Some have produced bespoke purpose-built pieces for
this volume, while others have drawn
on their regular specialisations. The first
group—those directed specifically at
Sadli and his contribution—universally
record, with admiration and warm affection, the benefits they have received
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Book Reviews
from knowing Sadli. His facility with the
pen—the ability to master an issue and
then write about it in an accessible
way—is a common theme. These articles capture not just the wide-ranging
and often iconoclastic contributions that
Sadli made to policy and commentary
over such a long period, but the impish
charm and wit that has made him so
universally liked. The contributions include delightfully light-hearted reminiscences about Sadli, and some amusing
photos. The one regret here is that we
are none the wiser about the reasons that
took him out of the immediate circle of
the policy making ‘technocrats’, to the
more distant commentator’s role.
The other contributions range across
the full spectrum of the economy and
the issues facing Indonesia: macroeconomic questions; microeconomic issues and decentralisation (three separate
contributions on this vital topic); social,
poverty and income distribution issues;
political economy and globalisation. Just
about all of the Big Issues are covered
here: the problems of the budget, where
tax revenues are still low by international standards and interest payments
on government debt are large; regionalism and what that implies for economic
management; the role of the state, and
in particular state ownership of enterprises; two contrasting pieces on the role
of the central bank, from different but
knowledgeable viewpoints; a wideranging piece by the former Bank Indonesia governor; and ‘from-the-trenches’
reporting of policy under three presidents, by the current Minister of Finance
[see the article by Dr Boediono reproduced in this issue]. Sometimes the
opportunity is used to take a personal
hobby-horse for a canter, and in one or
two cases old material has been pressed
405
into service. But all of the contributors
recognise that an era has come to an end
for Indonesia. And none sees democracy—whatever its virtues—as making
the task of running the economy any
easier, with ‘implementation in the
hands of a vastly weaker and less focussed government’ (Bresnan). The political scientists among the contributors
are more enthusiastic about the prospects, after the lean years (from their
perspective) of the Soeharto era. Judgments on these years are not the central
issue here, although it might be worth
noting the range of views, with
McCawley referring to ‘the remarkable
man who was the second President of
the Republic of Indonesia’, while for
Bresnan ‘the principal cause of the depth
of their country’s suffering was an autocratic and corrupt President’.
We know that Sadli can talk and
write; we learn that he can listen as
well—one of the charming anecdotes
recorded here concerns the criticism
that, in all his writing over 30 years, he
had never addressed the issue of gender. Faced by this lightly put but pointed
accusation, he responded that there was
a division of labour in the family, with
his wife looking after these issues. But
within a month he had, himself, addressed the topic in one of his columns.
The diversity of the contributions and
their wide range reflects the eclectic interests of Sadli himself. This volume
brings together current thinking on the
range of the issues Indonesia is facing,
and is a fitting tribute to the ‘public intellectual at large’. The editors pose the
obvious question: ‘where are the new
Sadlis?’.
Stephen Grenville
Sydney and ANU
406
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Daniel Fitzpatrick (2002), Land Claims in East Timor, Asia Pacific Press, Canberra,
pp. 246. A$40.00.
The appearance of Daniel Fitzpatrick’s
book in mid 2002 is timely, accompanying the independence of the tiny country from the UN Transitional Authority
for East Timor (UNTAET). This wellresearched volume systematically explores the main land issues, providing
comprehensive background and focusing on the many conflicting claims and
on routes to resolving them.
The first chapter vividly recalls for
those of us near the events described the
traumas and tragedies of the Indonesian
occupation and its aftermath. It notes
some horrifying incidents, including the
displacement from their land of threequarters of the Timorese peoples, the final widespread destruction of buildings
and other infrastructures by the departing militia and Indonesian forces, and
the burning of all land titles offices and
most records. It points as well to the failure of UNTAET under pressure from the
new national cabinet to provide for private land administration, resulting in
legal uncertainty, lack of public housing and deterrence to private investors.
Then in subsequent chapters the book
turns to topics pertinent to understanding and solving the difficult and complex land problems of East Timor. It
addresses the traditional relations of
people to land, showing how various
societal and governmental arrangements have regulated land use. It
scrutinises key questions surrounding
land claims based on Indonesian titles,
looking in depth at these titles and their
administration. It reviews claims to land
based on Portuguese-era titles, describing the nature of the latter and their status under Indonesian rule. It goes on to
discuss claims based on traditional
rights, finally presenting options for resolving land claims in East Timor.
While Sir Gerard Brennan states in his
Foreword that ‘East Timor begins its life
as a new and independent nation without the benefit of established laws and
institutions to regulate land’ (p. ix), the
book illustrates how the country is actually endowed with many laws governing land use. These laws comprise not
only traditional arrangements stemming
from the past but also the remnants of
systems established by colonial occupiers. The difficulties are to reconcile these
different approaches in light of competing claims and accompanying political
demands. Fitzpatrick valiantly attempts
to indicate ways out of these problems,
interestinglyreferring to how other countries in similar circumstances have tried
to solve their own land use dilemmas.
The author refreshingly argues that
traditional rights to land should be
broadly recognised in East Timor. This
is a key recommendation, and bases the
resolution of land claims on the most
widely accepted and inherently flexible
land use system. He also subscribes
heavily, in relation to rural and urban
lands, to the idea of ‘tenure reform’
rather than ‘land distribution’. He recommends, for instance, that smallholders wh o re-occu pied former
Portuguese and Indonesian plantations
in East Timor ‘may receive formal
rights under a program of tenure reform’, where these rights ‘arise either
from traditional connections to the
land, or possibly from occupation for
… 12 or more years’ (p. 149). But in
other cases where titles issued by
former authorities may reasonably be
recognised, he argues in favour of that.
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Book Reviews
Fitzpatrick is manifestly conscious of
the high costs of revamping land use
systems and of complications arising
from attendant political considerations.
This is under circumstances where progressive reform is likely to be more feasible than wholesale alteration. In the
case of customary tenure he cautions
against a ‘minimalist’ and noninterventionist approach to adjustment,
suggesting, on the reform principle,
that there should be a ‘three-tier system of conflict resolution’. That would
entail resort to ‘traditional processes,
then mediation and, failing that, judicial determination’ (p. 176), perhaps
modelled on the land court system of
Papua New Guinea.
As well as pursuing its main themes,
the book records many associated aspects
of great interest. It describes, for example,
the concern of Fretilin, the leading party
of the revolution and independence,with
‘land justice for traditional and/or dispossessed groups’ and with implementing land reform (p. 16). This concern and
the underlying political pressures from
it seem likely to influence future land
policies critically. The book also recounts
the ‘corrupt’ securing of titles by Indonesian ‘cronies’ and military interests, including the now retired generals Benny
Moerdani and Dading Kalbuadi, who
operated through a trading company, PT
407
Depok Hernandes International. This
company ‘quickly took over all smallholder and SAPT [a Portuguese public
company] coffee plantations in Ermera’
following the Indonesian invasion in
1975, and ‘was also given an exclusive
licence over all buying, selling and transporting of coffee in East Timor’. These
and numerous other inclusions add
valuable flavour, and serve to enhance
understanding of the volume’s central
questions.
The book is especially valuable in comprehensively documenting current East
Timorese land problems and accompanying political events and pressures. It
valiantly tackles the hard task of indicating solutions to these problems, doing
this partly in sections dealing with specific types of claim, and partly in a disappointingly brief closing chapter. Such
resolution is indeed a big problem in the
future development of East Timor, and
more extended discussions of it will be
welcome. That is especially so for those
in East Timor undertaking the weighty
tasks of formulating land policies and
resolving land claims. But Fitzpatrick has
made an excellent beginning, and it is
hoped he will follow this up with further
analyses.
Colin Barlow
Wolfson College, Oxford
Piter Abdullah, Armida S. Alisjahbana, Nury Effendi and Boediono (2002), Daya
Saing Daerah: Konsep dan Pengukurannya di Indonesia [The Competitiveness of Regions: Concepts and Measurement in Indonesia], Pusat Pendidikan dan Studi
Kebanksentralan, Bank Indonesia [Centre for Central Banking Studies and Training, Bank Indonesia], BPFE-Yogyakarta, pp. x + 354.
This book ‘attempts to contribute to an
understanding of the competitiveness
of regions in Indonesia from both a conceptual and a measurement perspec-
tive’. The approach it takes is to rank
all provinces on each of a very large
number of variables (nearly 200 in all)
that are presumed to be indicative of
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408
their relative competitiveness. These
variables are of two kinds: first, published data from a variety of sources
that are available on a provincial basis;
and second, survey data that reveal perceptions about doing business in each
province. The authors derive an overall ranking of all the provinces’ ‘competitiveness’, which seems to be based
(though this is not clear) on the sum of
each province’s rankings in relation to
each of these variables.
The book has some usefulness as a
compendium of economic data arranged
by province, even though the presentation is by no means ‘user friendly’. Unfortunately, however, a very large
proportion of the variables presented
appear to have little if anything to do
with competitiveness. Consider a small
selection of the indicators that collectively are assumed to enable the reader
to conclude that province X is ‘more
competitive’ than province Y: the Gini
coefficient (an indicator of income inequality); life expectancy; the share of
urban area in total land area of the province (a high value of which presumably
does little for the competitiveness of
agricultural pursuits); the reliance on
rivers to transport goods (a high ranking here seems to be taken as a positive
contributor to ‘competitiveness’!); the
ratio of the length of railway lines to
total land area; the average wage in
manufacturing (a high value of which
presumably does little for the competitiveness of labour-intensive manufacturing); and so on. There is little attempt to
justify the inclusion of these diverse indicators, so we have no way of knowing how the authors rationalise their
often perplexing choices.
A province’s ‘competitiveness’, in the
sense of the ease or difficulty of doing
business there, needs to be carefully distinguished from the ease or difficulty of
Book Reviews
producing particular goods and services
within each province. For example, the
observation that Irian Jaya has about
7,000 times as much productive forest
as DKI Jakarta (the Jakarta Capital Region) certainly suggests that the former
will enjoy a competitive advantage in
producing logs, but it tells us nothing
whatsoever about the relative ease of
doing business in general in these two
provinces.
This kind of study is potentially useful to policy makers, provided that it
focuses clearly (though not exclusively)
on aspects of doing business that are
under their control—such as whether it
is easy to obtain a licence to establish a
new business or to carry on normal business activity without excessive bureaucratic interference, or whether public
sector infrastructure is adequate. Some
of the survey data do relate to these
kinds of issues, but there is often hardly
any difference in the survey results
across provinces except, perhaps, for a
small number of outliers in each case. A
weakness of the study is that there is no
statistical testing to determine whether
the rankings based on such variables are
correlated or randomly distributed.
A final comment: it is difficult to understand why Indonesia’s central bank
would allocate its resources to a research project that has nothing whatsoever to do with central banking. Bank
Indonesia’s major functions are to control the value of the rupiah and to maintain the integrity of the banking system,
and it has had enormous difficulties
with both over the last five years. One
would have thought all of its intellectual energy would now be devoted to
understanding what went wrong, and
how to avoid a repetition.
Ross H. McLeod
ANU
Book Reviews
409
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Takahiro Akita and Yoichi Nakamura (eds) (2000), Green GDP Estimates in China,
Indonesia, and Japan: An Application of the UN Environmental and Economic Accounting System, United Nations University (UNU/IAS), Tokyo, pp. 109. US$10.00; ¥500.
This report discusses the System of Integrated Environmental and Economic
Accounting (SEEA), and uses it to estimate ‘Green GDP’ for Japan, Indonesia
and China. The SEEA inserts an environmental account into the traditional
System of National Accounts (SNA)
used to calculate Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Thus Green GDP, also known
as Eco Domestic Product, is a correction
to GDP that takes account of the cost of
natural resource depletion and environmental degradation.
The first part of the report contrasts
the SEEA with the National Accounting
Matrix including Environmental Accounts (NAMEA), which is an extension
of a social accounting matrix (SAM) that
includes flow accounts relating to natural resources. The report argues that the
main difference between the NAMEA
and the SEEA is that the flow accounts
for natural resources in the former are
presented only in physical units,
whereas in the SEEA they are expressed
in monetary units (p. 1). It would have
been helpful if the report had briefly
elaborated the nature of the SAM and
the SNA, and then made it clear that the
NAMEA and the SEEA are two very
different accounting systems, developed
for different purposes. The NAMEA was
devised to observe and account in detail for flows of natural resources, thus
providing a more complete social accounting matrix, while the SEEA was
developed purely to bring environmental aspects into the measure of GDP. It
should also be noted that there is a class
of the NAMEA, the Social and Environmental Accounting Matrix (SEAM), that
does in fact present pollution flow mea-
sures in monetary units (Resosudarmo
and Thorbecke 1996, 1998).
The second part of the book describes
the SEEA in detail. After explaining the
structure of the SNA, it sets out the steps
needed to calculate Net Domestic Product (NDP), i.e. GDP minus consumption
of produced fixed capital or assets such
as buildings, roads and machinery, and
of cultivated assets such as livestock and
plantations. Green GDP is NDP minus
the imputed environmental costs of operating the economy. There are two
sources of such costs: the consumption
of non-produced (natural) economic assets, such as oil, gas and coal reserves;
and the degradation of non-produced
non-economic assets, such as air and
water. The presentation would have
benefited from the provision of a list of
abbreviations for variables, a brief explanation of the meaning of each technical term, and a list of equations
showing the relationships between variables. Someone unfamiliar with the SNA
would have had to wait until the third
part of the report to understand the
meanings of the variables mentioned
here.
The last part reports on the application of the SEEA to Japan, China and
Indonesia. In estimating the cost of degradation or depletion of non-produced
natural assets, only three cases are covered. The first is the degradation of air
and water quality. The measures of air
quality are levels of SO X (sulphur oxide) and NOX (nitrogen oxide) pollutants for Japan and Indonesia, and SOX
and TSP (total suspended particles) for
China. The measures of water quality
are levels of BOD (biological oxygen de-
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410
mand), COD (chemical oxygen demand) and pollutants such as nitrate
and phosphorus for Japan, and levels
of BOD and COD for Indonesia. No
water quality indicators are considered
for China. The second case is the destruction of the ecosystem in forests and
other land types. The third is the depletion of subsoil resources such as oil, gas
and coal.
While at this stage lack of data makes
it impractical to build an accounting system that covers all pollution problems
and all cases of natural resource depletion, there is still a need to justify the
inclusion or exclusion of particular pollutants or cases of natural resource
depletion in the accounts, but this has
not been done here. For air pollution, for
example, the SEEA for Indonesia covers only SO X and NOX, yet studies have
shown that PM 10 (Particulate Matter
with a diameter of 10 micrometres or
less) creates greater health problems
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than either of these, and data on PM10
are available for Indonesia. In relation
to water pollution, it is not clear whether
the SEEA for China and Indonesia covers both ground and surface water pollution: if only the latter is covered, does
this mean that data on ground water
pollution are not available, or that the
problem is trivial in those countries?
Another important omission is the case
of marine resource depletion, which is
very important for Indonesia, at least.
Despite these criticisms, the report
can be recommended to those who work
on SNA, and the authors are to be congratulated for their contribution to the
literature. Readers can learn much about
the kinds of data that are available, and
how the environmental cost of economic
activity can be estimated when relevant
information is very limited.
Budy P. Resosudarmo
ANU
References
Resosudarmo, B.P., and E. Thorbecke (1996),
‘The Impact of Environmental Policies on
Household Incomes for Different SocioEconomic Classes: The Case of Air Pollutants in Indonesia’, Ecological Economics
17: 83–94.
Resosudarmo, B.P., and E. Thorbecke (1998),
‘Reducing the Number of Pesticide Related Illnesses: The Impact on Households
in Indonesia’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 34 (2): 143–57.