Number of results to display per page
Search Results
32. Going the Distance: The U.S. Tsunami Relief Effort
- Publication Date:
- 01-2005
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
- Abstract:
- On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the west coast of Northern Sumatra, Indonesia, triggered a tsunami—a series of giant waves—that inundated coastal areas of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and Malaysia, as well as Indian Ocean islands and parts of East Africa.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Development, Economics, and International Cooperation
- Political Geography:
- Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and East Africa
33. Examining the Role of Foreign Assistance in Security Sector Reforms: The Indonesian Case
- Author:
- Eduardo Lachica
- Publication Date:
- 04-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
- Abstract:
- Indonesia and the donor community are agreed that security sector reforms are needed to restore investor confidence and sustain the pace of economic recovery. However, donor-assisted programmes have had only a limited success so far and the army's post-Suharto reforms appeared to have ground to a halt. This paper offers some suggestions on how to restore the momentum for reform in the light of donor limitations, the military's historical circumstances and the current mood of intense nationalism. Donors should initiate a quiet Track II (non-official) dialogue with the military, the police, the civilian authorities and civil society to scope out a doable programme of cooperation. The issue of civilian supremacy should be dealt with pragmatically, allowing for a process of negotiation to find an effective working relationship between civilian and military authorities. The dialogue should frame the reform process as a burden for the entire society, reminding civilian leaders that they too have a responsibility to improve their performance and demonstrate their ability to oversee military affairs capably and fairly. Since U.S. assistance to the Indonesian military is likely to remain constrained, the paper proposes a "military donors club" that can expand the donor base and work informally with the World Bank-led Consultative Group on Indonesia. The dialogue should deal creatively and patiently with two of the most vexing issues relating to the army — restructuring its network of territorial commands and phasing out its controversial tradition of self-financing. This could be a difficult learning process for both sides of the civilian-military divide that could last a decade or more.
- Topic:
- Defense Policy, Economics, and International Trade and Finance
- Political Geography:
- United States, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia
34. Asian Oil Market Outlook: Role of the Key Players
- Author:
- Jeffrey Brown and Kang Wu
- Publication Date:
- 10-2003
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- East-West Center
- Abstract:
- The Asia Pacific region's dynamic oil market is marked by strong growth in consumption, declining regional oil production, and over capacity in its highly competitive oil-refining sector. Its "key players" are China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea—a group that includes the region's five top consumers and three of its major producers—and developments in these countries will have commercial and strategic implications for the whole region. On the consumption side, Japan's slow growth in demand has failed to dampen regional growth, which is now driven by China and India's fast growing thirst for oil. On the supply side, Indonesia's inevitable transition to a net oil importer highlights the trend toward growing dependence on Middle East oil, which already comprises 42–90 percent of imports among the key players. In response to this trend, China, Japan, and South Korea are pushing to acquire overseas oil reserves, with Japan and China already locked in a fierce competition for projected Russian supplies—a type of struggle that will likely become more commonplace.
- Topic:
- Economics and International Trade and Finance
- Political Geography:
- Japan, China, Indonesia, Middle East, India, Asia, and South Korea
35. How Responsive is Poverty to Growth? A Regional Analysis of Poverty, Inequality, and Growth in Indonesia, 1984-99
- Author:
- Jed Friedman
- Publication Date:
- 08-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- United Nations University
- Abstract:
- This paper uses six nationally representative household consumption surveys to develop successive poverty profiles for Indonesia over a fifteen-year period of sustained high growth followed by rapid contraction. Adopting a 'cost-of-basic-needs' approach to poverty determination (an approach particularly suited to measures of absolute poverty), this paper develops price indices and calculates poverty lines from unit value data, an oft neglected source of information. The summary findings confirm that Indonesia has witnessed broadbased gains in poverty reduction over the period 1984-96 and then a dramatic reversal during the recent financial crisis. These summary findings, however, mask substantial diversity in growth, inequality, and poverty change across Indonesian regions and so subsequent analysis focuses on the links between growth, inequality, and changes in poverty at the regional level. As opposed to previous studies of poverty change that have used short panels of cross-national data to identify the relationship between growth and poverty, this study employs a longer panel for a single country in order to investigate how poverty change at the provincial level varies with province growth rates and province changes in inequality (while controlling for time invariant province characteristics). The results indicate that poverty change is highly responsive to overall growth. However closer analysis reveals that regional differences in poverty levels persist even after controlling for the effects of provincial income levels, particularly for rural areas. These findings suggest that local factors play an important role in poverty determination and may interact with growth to impact poverty reduction in differing ways across Indonesia. Future investigations will need to take a more careful look at these local determinants of poverty change and attempt to identify the types of growth toward which poverty measures are particularly responsive.
- Topic:
- Development, Economics, and Poverty
- Political Geography:
- Indonesia
36. The Rise and Fall of the Indonesian Economy
- Author:
- Joseph J. Stern
- Publication Date:
- 06-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
- Abstract:
- The Indonesia crisis was particularly severe. What began as an economic crisis quickly evolved in to a political crisis. Most analysts failed to recognize the growing weaknesses of the economy and were caught by surprise. In part Indonesia's economic success over the period 1985 through 1997 and its records on policy reforms had persuaded many that, despite some obvious weaknesses, it would come through the Asian crisis with minimum damage. A closer analysis of the Indonesia's economic history shows that the initial reforms, carefully crafted by a highly respected group of economic technocrats, tackled many of the most serious distortions that held back economic growth. But as these reforms began to pay off in terms of higher growth rates, sharply declining poverty rates, and an increased level of integration in the global economy, the desire for further reforms waned. Over time the beneficiaries of the early reforms allied themselves with the political elites to block further reforms and in effect reduced the power of the technocrats to resist a return to the dirigiste tendencies that had marked much of Indonesia's early development efforts. While the reforms were important, in retrospect they were insufficient to create an institutional infrastructure that could weather a dramatic economic downturn.
- Topic:
- Corruption, Economics, Poverty, Financial Crisis, Reform, and Economic Policy
- Political Geography:
- Indonesia and Southeast Asia
37. The Role Of Transition Assistance: The Case Of Indonesia
- Author:
- Glenn Slocum and Jean DuRette
- Publication Date:
- 03-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- United States Agency for International Development
- Abstract:
- The Center for Development Information and Evaluation (CDIE) has responsibility for conducting Agency-wide evaluations on assistance topics of interest to USAID managers. In 2000, USAID began an evaluation of the role of transition assistance, with a specific emphasis on the role and activities of the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in the Bureau of Humanitarian Response (BHR).
- Topic:
- Democratization, Development, Economics, Government, and Politics
- Political Geography:
- Indonesia and Southeast Asia
38. The Argentine Implosion
- Author:
- Luigi Manzetti
- Publication Date:
- 11-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The North-South Center, University of Miami
- Abstract:
- In December 2001, Argentina recorded the world's largest default ever, as it failed to honor payments on its US$132 billion foreign debt. Since then, five presidents have been in power, the Argentine peso has been devalued by 120 percent, and the banking system has virtually collapsed, dragging the economy into a depression. The gross domestic product (GDP) contracted 16.3 percent in the first quarter of 2002. Argentina's per capita income has become one of the worst in Latin America, and, as a result, more than one-third of its people live under the poverty line. 1 Argentines' confidence in their elected officials has disappeared. By most accounts, the country has literally imploded to a degree that has no precedent in Latin America's contemporary history. This is particularly bewildering, considering that only 10 years ago Argentina was hailed around the world as a model of successful economic reforms, with standards of living that were not only the highest in the region but comparable to those of some southern European countries. How could Argentina go from role model to international outcast so quickly? Some place the blame on external shocks created by the financial crises in Mexico (1995), Indonesia (1997), Thailand (1998), and Russia (1998). Others say the cause of the problem was misguided policy advice from the International Monetary Fund (Stiglitz 2002). Yet, most analyses ascribe much of the trouble to the Convertibility Law's fixed exchange rate policy adopted in 1991.
- Topic:
- Economics, Government, and International Trade and Finance
- Political Geography:
- Russia, Indonesia, Argentina, South America, Latin America, Mexico, and Thailand
39. Poverty Incidence and Sectoral Growth: Evidence from Southeast Asia
- Author:
- Peter G. Warr
- Publication Date:
- 02-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- United Nations University
- Abstract:
- In recent decades, absolute poverty incidence declined in most countries of Southeast Asia, even though in some of these countries inequality increased at the same time. This paper examines the relationship between these outcomes and the rate of economic growth in the agricultural, industrial and services sectors. It develops a time series of available data on the headcount measure of poverty incidence for Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines over the period from the 1960s to 1999, in aggregate and in both rural and urban areas. It then uses this pooled data set to analyze the economic determinants of changes in poverty incidence.
- Topic:
- Development, Economics, and International Trade and Finance
- Political Geography:
- Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Southeast Asia
40. How Economic Growth Reduces Poverty: A General Equilibrium Analysis for Indonesia
- Author:
- Peter G. Warr and George Fane
- Publication Date:
- 02-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- United Nations University
- Abstract:
- Do changes in poverty and inequality depend directly on the rate of economic growth, or does the source of the growth also matter? This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model of the Indonesian economy to explore this question by simulating increases in GDP arising from (i) technical progress in each of seven broad sectors, and (ii) the accumulation of each of six types of physical and human capital. The more a given amount of growth raises the returns to the factors that are more important sources of income for the poor than for the non-poor, the more it reduces poverty and inequality. Different sources of growth affect poverty and inequality differently because they affect factor returns differently, and because the poor and the non-poor own factors in different proportions.
- Topic:
- Development, Economics, and International Trade and Finance
- Political Geography:
- Indonesia and Southeast Asia