Economic Change in Modern Indonesia

Even to the most jaded students of the Indonesian economy, Anne Booth manages to reveal new, and sometimes surprising, insights in Economic Change in Modern Indonesia.Anyone interested in the contemporary Indonesian economy will be much better informed by reading it and learning about the legacy of colonialism in shaping institutions that affect Indonesia's contemporary economic outlook.Booth argues that despite some remarkable economic progress in Indonesia since 1950, several economic development issues dating back to the Dutch colonial period remain unresolved; namely, the unholy alliance between the government and private sectors, the efficacy of 'populist' government policies to reduce poverty and inequality, and the limited ability of the government to finance development.How colonization and colonial government policies have persistent effects on economic performance of independent countries is not a new topic for economists.For example, in the field of macroeconomics, it is well-established that different types of colonialism led to different institutional settings, resulting in different long-run growth trajectories post-independence.Numerous applied microeconomics studies quantitatively estimate the effect of colonial government policies, such as the building of railways or sugar plantation development, on their current economic activities' outcomes, such as trade cost, real income, or production-enhancing institutions.What Professor Booth does in this book, however, is to go deep into one country-specific case and provide us with a rich economic history analysis to support her main argument: some institutional rigidities from the colonial era continue to assert their influence despite 70 years of post-independence economic and political ups and downs.Economists working on the Indonesian economy, as well as political scientists and public policy specialists, will find this book a valuable complement to their quantitative modeling or econometric results, providing deeper insights and a broader context than can be found in scholarship limited to econometric modelling.Students working on privatization and deregulation, income redistribution policies, and fiscal policies in Indonesia may find themselves surprised by the fact that many of current institutional constraints for economic reform can be traced all the way back to the late Dutch colonial period, as Booth emphasizes.A large part of this book, chapters 2 to 6, exhibits a historical overview of the modern Indonesian economy, divided over three historical watersheds

Argument (complex analysis · Colonialism · Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Government (linguistics · Independence (probability theory · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Economic Growth and Fiscal Policies · Law