Mengatasi keraguan luar negeri
....selanjutnya
{The footnotes in this document were added on 27 December 2008, as I reviewed the
original document – all with the comforting distance of 10 years of hind-sight!
The comments are intended to provide both a little historic context that may now have
been forgotten with time and also to provide some auto-criticism of where I believe
my analysis was flawed or perhaps biased. From the original document I have also
corrected typing mistakes and grammatical errors without changing the integrity and
substance of what was initially written. The footnotes therefore do not represent part
of the original document.}
1998-06-07
Spanners in the works
....selanjutnya
{The footnotes in this document were added on 31 December 2006, as I reviewed the
original document – all with the comforting distance of almost 9 years of hind-sight!
The comments are intended to provide both a little historic context that may now have
been forgotten with time and also to provide some auto-criticism of where I believe
my analysis was flawed or perhaps biased. From the original document I have also
corrected typing mistakes and grammatical errors without changing the integrity and
substance of what was initially written. The footnotes therefore do not represent part
of the original document.}
1998-06-01
Indonesia: looking ahead
....selanjutnya
{The footnotes in this document were added on 31 December 2006, as I reviewed the
original document – all with the comforting distance of almost 9 years of hind-sight!
The comments are intended to provide both a little historic context that may now have
been forgotten with time and also to provide some auto-criticism of where I believe
my analysis was flawed or perhaps biased. From the original document I have also
corrected typing mistakes and grammatical errors without changing the integrity and
substance of what was initially written. The footnotes therefore do not represent part
of the original document.}
1998-05-30
A small step for Indonesia, The first step for reform
....selanjutnya
{The footnotes in this document were added on 30 December 2006, as I reviewed the
original document – all with the comforting distance of almost 9 years of hind–sight!
The comments are intended to provide both a little historic context that may now have
been forgotten with time and also to provide some auto-criticism of where I believe
my analysis was flawed or perhaps biased. From the original document I have also
corrected typing mistakes and grammatical errors without changing the integrity and
substance of what was initially written. The footnotes therefore do not represent part
of the original document.}
1998-05-21
Jockeys for reform
....selanjutnya
{The document was drafted on Tuesday 19 May and completed on the morning of
Wednesday 20 May, one day before the President resigned.
The pace with which events were unfolding, and rumours spreading, was quite
breathtaking. It was becoming increasingly hard not to get lost among the individual
events and lose tracks of the key dynamics. While it was clear that the leadership of
the day was clearly losing the plot, I had no intention of doing likewise! At the same
time it was also not easy not to get so carried away with the events and thereby lose a
capacity to analyse the unfolding events with some rigour.
The footnotes in this document were added on 31 December 2006, as I reviewed the
original document – all with the comforting distance of almost 9 years of hind-sight!
The comments are intended to provide both a little historic context that may now have
been forgotten with time and also to provide some auto-criticism of where I believe
my analysis was flawed or perhaps biased. From the original document I have also
corrected typing mistakes and grammatical errors without changing the integrity and
substance of what was initially written. The footnotes therefore do not represent part
of the original document.}
1998-05-19
Looting and pillaging
....selanjutnya
{The footnotes in this document were added on 30 December 2006, as I reviewed the
original document – all with the comforting distance of almost 9 years of hind-sight!
The comments are intended to provide both a little historic context that may now have
been forgotten with time and also to provide some auto-criticism of where I believe
my analysis was flawed or perhaps biased. From the original document I have also
corrected typing mistakes and grammatical errors without changing the integrity and
substance of what was initially written. The footnotes therefore do not represent part
of the original document.}
1998-05-17
Game over
....selanjutnya
{The footnotes in this document were added on 30 December 2006, as I reviewed the
original document – all with the comforting distance of almost 9 years of hind-sight!
The comments are intended to provide both a little historic context that may now have
been forgotten with time and also to provide some auto-criticism of where I believe
my analysis was flawed or perhaps biased. From the original document I have also
corrected typing mistakes and grammatical errors without changing the integrity and
substance of what was initially written.}
1998-05-13
Indonesia's political and economic prospects
....selanjutnya
{This report was written 10 days before the opening of the General Session of the
MPR scheduled for March 1998. At the time, the currency has recently fallen to
below Rp 10,000 to the US dollar and the accumulative impact of the currency
collapse now was being reflected in the rate of inflation which in the month of
January 1998 reached nearly 7%, the highest rate since the days of hyperinflation in
the 1960s. Fears about the impending welfare catastrophe of the crisis were
mounting. Student groups were now becoming more active with demonstrations
across the archipelago taking place on a “rolling” basis – different city each day.
The Government was clearly ruffled. Also if I recall correctly the expected “kick–in”
effect to boost confidence in the wake of the radical IMF agreement of January failed
to materialise as most considered it too ambitious and unrealistic to achieve and at
the same time Pres. Soeharto was also clearly and publicly squirming to evade the
necessary disciplines through seeking such alternatives as a currency board.
The footnotes in this document were added on 31 December 2006, as I reviewed the
original document – all with the comforting distance of almost 9 years of hind–sight!
The comments are intended to provide both a little historic context that may now have
been forgotten with time and also to provide some auto–criticism of where I believe
my analysis was flawed or perhaps biased. From the original document I have also
corrected typing mistakes and grammatical errors without changing the integrity and
substance of what was initially written. The footnotes therefore do not represent part
of the original document.}
1998-02-19
Why the New IMF package will also fail to restore confidence
....selanjutnya
{This document was written just after the infamous “;crossed arms standing over Pres.
Soeharto”; photo. At the time I was bed ridden with typhoid and recall being both
bored with illness and then very frustrated by what I thought was a stupid and
unenforceable agreement. If a key objective of these IMF agreements is to raise
market confidence in the economic management of the country concerned, then surely
this is an objective guaranteed to fail if the agreements are simply not able to be
implemented.
I recall laying in bed watching TV and listening to the assorted policies changes
which the Government had signed up to make, and concluding instantly that this was
impossible to achieve. These changes essentially would force the Government to
commit political suicide, and that was not going to happen – certainly not through
some agreement. The result of an unenforceable agreement, of course, will see the
Government abrogate these commitments, which will in turn further undermine
confidence, leading to further capital flight and to further weakening of the currency.
The ultimate impact of this unenforceable agreement would simply be to amplify the
Government's failings and accelerate its eventual demise, hardly a recipe for
rebuilding confidence.
In some ways I was surprised that much of the Jakarta commentariat took this
agreement seriously and actually believed that there would now be light at the end of
the crisis tunnel. To me it was just a technocrat's Christmas shopping list of
economically rationalist desires that was completely de-linked from political reality.
Even if we concede that each of the white elephants and sacred cows put up for
slaughter in that agreement were a drain to the nation, this misses the point of the
whole exercise, which was to raise the level of confidence in the system. Setting the
country up for another failure would simply fail to achieve that objective.
At another level, that is at the political level, the agreement did reveal that the limits
of reform to which the Government of the day could commit, was simply insufficient
to steer the country through the crisis. In essence the agreement declared the need
for “;regime change”;. One often wonders whether these IMF rescue packages are not
actually framed with such a logic in mind. I am not promoting some kind of
conspiracy or Dependency or Centre-Periphery theory, as the same could be said for
the impact of the Sterling Crisis and the UK's IMF program. Clearly the Thatcher
revolution, which finally killed British syndicalism, represented clear evidence of
regime change in this developed nation. I look forward to being corrected, but I can
only think of the example of Chile under Pres. Pinochet whose regime survived for
several years after calling in the IMF to assist Chile overcome its financial crunch in
1982. Perhaps it might be seen that any government calling in the IMF is basically
admitting its own failure to manage its economic circumstances.
The footnotes in this document were added on 1 January 2007, as I reviewed the
original document – all with the comforting distance of almost 9 years of hind-sight!
The comments are intended to provide both a little historic context that may now have
been forgotten with time and also to provide some auto-criticism of where I believe
my analysis was flawed or perhaps biased. From the original document I have also
corrected typing mistakes and grammatical errors without changing the integrity and
substance of what was initially written. The footnotes therefore do not represent part
of the original document.}
1998-01-16
Indonesia Update speech: 1998
....selanjutnya
Speech by Kevin Evans, Strategist with ANZIB (Australia New Zealand Investment
Bank), Jakarta to the Indonesia Update. This Update is a gathering in September each
year of Indonesian experts and is conducted at the Australian National University,
Canberra). This speech was the economic presentation for the 1998 Indonesia
Update.
1998-01-01
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