Tag: Indonesia

Written by lookingbeyondborders

Indonesia Has Made A Remarkable Economic Comeback. Yet, Its Amazing Growth Is Neither Sustainable Nor Inclusive.

An inconvenient fact is that Indonesia’s economic growth is mainly driven by a commodity boom fuelled by China’s appetite for raw materials and global demand for biofuels. China’s enterprises are building bullet trains while Indian car– and IT-companies compete around the world. Indonesia, all the while, manufactures…essentially nothing. Most international manufacturing companies have moved on to greener […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

The Asian Sleepwalkers

Whether East Asia’s politicians and pundits like it or not, the region’s current international relations are more akin to nineteenth-century European balance-of-power politics than to the stable Europe of today. Witness East Asia’s rising nationalism, territorial disputes, and lack of effective institutional mechanisms for security cooperation. While economic interdependence among China, Japan, South Korea, and […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

India Joins Indonesia Facing Heightened Policy Dilemma

Central banks in Indonesia and India, with the worst-performing currencies among Asian emerging markets this year, will face more challenges in 2013 as they balance inflation risks with the need to boost growth. The Reserve Bank of India must deal with “conflicting cues” from elevated prices and an economic slowdown, complicating policy decisions even after […]

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Ferraris Outnumber Plans to Clean Up Asia’s Corruption

Transparency International’s latest corruption report is sober reading for Asian leaders committed to ending dirty dealings in the world’s fastest-growing region. Dec. 9 was International Anti-Corruption Day, and Asia’s report card was a big disappointment.China (SHCOMP), Japan and South Korea, three of Asia’s four biggest economies, all lost ground. So did such emerging-market darlings as Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. Even Hong Kong, routinely […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

Russia, China on “Wrong Side of History” in Arab World

The Middle East is undergoing a historic transformation. Parts of the region are up in flames, and Asia’s primary powers either have no role or a destructive one. Pakistan, Indonesia and other Asian Muslim countries, as well as India, with the world’s second-largest Muslim population, are largely uninvolved, as if events in the region have no […]

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Broken BRICs

Over the past several years, the most talked-about trend in the global economy has been the so-called rise of the rest, which saw the economies of many developing countries swiftly converging with those of their more developed peers. The primary engines behind this phenomenon were the four major emerging-market countries, known as the BRICs: Brazil, […]

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Asia Knows How to Get Along With a Bigger China

Preparing for a recent trip to Indonesia last week, I came across an article by Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, the editor of the feisty Indonesian daily Jakarta Post, protesting that the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia seemed too much like an attempt to start a cold war against China, with the help of its neighbors. America’s “economic intentions and wherewithal” in […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

Lesson of Indonesia’s Democratic Experience

We see a positive trend of significant expansion of democracy, particularly in the second half of the 20th century. Democracy expanded in many regions of the world. It also swept Indonesia in 1997 – and changed us for good. As a result, the political map of the world was significantly changed, with all its strategic, […]

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