Indonesia, the most populous country in Southeast Asia, has made great strides over the last 20 years. Enjoying solid economic growth, mostly in the 5 to 6 percent range, the country has emerged as one of the economic success stories of Southeast Asia.
Poverty has been reduced and a rising middle-class has emerged.
This new-found prosperity, however, has produced a worrying problem for Indonesia’s economic planners: A rising underclass — millions of people who have not felt the benefits of Indonesia’s new-found wealth.
The chief economist with Asian Development Bank (ADB), Changyong Rhee, says Indonesia is seeing a long-term shift in the way the gap between the rich and the poor has been managed.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Asia was better at ensuring that growth did not marginalize large chunks of the region’s population and was actually reducing the gap between the rich and the poor, Rhee says.
“However, over the past decade the sudden explosion of growth and rapid enrichment of many people has seen the rich-poor divide grow,” he says.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous nation, is expected to grow by about 6 percent this year. ADB recently cut its growth forecast for 2012 from 6.5 percent to 6.4 percent.
Southeast Asia’s largest economy grew by 6.5 percent in 2011, its fastest rate of growth since 1996, driven largely by growing private consumption, strong investment and exports led by commodities. Household consumption accounted for 56 percent of economic activity last year.
The country has seen an average annual GDP growth rate of over 5 percent from 2001 to 2011 and its sovereign-debt status was increased to investment grade by two major ratings agencies this year.
But despite the economic success and recent falls in poverty, not everyone in the sprawling archipelago nation has benefited. Millions of people have been left behind.
Both ADB and the World Bank have warned that the income inequality gap threatens to derail all the gains made over the last 10 years.
Millions of people working in sweatshops throughout the country, turning out designer sports shoes and apparel for a few dollars a day, feel they have been left behind in a country that produces dollar millionaires at a rate of 16 a day, according to consulting firm Capgemini.
By 2015 the number of millionaires in Indonesia is expected to triple to 99,000, according to wealth management firm Julius Baer, the quickest pace by any Asian country.
According to the World Bank, about 40 percent of the population — around 100 million people — live on less than $2 a day.
Christian von Luebke, a research fellow with the Asia/Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, wrote in a paper last year: “In light of strong economic growth, combined with a youthful demographic profile and stable democracy, a rising number of analysts portray Indonesia as the next Asian tiger in the making.
“What usually escapes attention is that economic progress has ‘trickled down’ very unevenly across groups and regions — and often more unevenly than official reports would have us believe.”
Luebke also noted that although Indonesia has embraced a democratic and decentralized government, the disparities between socio-economic groups and subnational regions remain substantial.
Thee Kian Wie, a senior economist at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences in Jakarta, said that despite Indonesia’s continued growth it has failed to bridge the rich-poor divide.
Thee said Indonesia’s poor are reflected by the large number of beggars in the cities and the number of workers in the informal sectors, which account for about two-thirds of Indonesia’s total labor force of more than 100 million people.
Thee also pointed out that males have much better access to education and employment than their female counterparts. Access for the rural poor to basic healthcare in their villages is also limited or inadequate, if it exists at all. Clean air, water and the protection of biodiversity are inadequate. So are anti-corruption measures.
“Indonesia’s struggle against the vested interests of the economic elite, which often distorts or adversely influences government policies, is generally ineffective or unsuccessful,” Thee said.
Mika Purra, managing director of StraitsGlobal, a risk management advisory firm in Singapore, said long-term economic development does not happen overnight.
“The capacity to innovate requires enduring national planning, targeted pooling of national resources and cooperation between the public and private sectors,” he wrote on the Financial Times blog beyondbrics.
He said while countries like Indonesia has the population to support growth, the structural reforms needed to sustain high economic growth may be difficult to achieve.
“The leap from low- to middle-income economy and beyond requires more than export-led growth that is based on low-skilled manufacturing and commodities trade,” Purra wrote.
In Indonesia, democratization has failed to break the layer of old elites that today controls 40 percent of the country’s natural resources and wealth.
Purra warned that strong nationalist and protectionist sentiment had put a brake on the country’s political and economic development, hampering the emergence of a sizeable, well-educated and skilled middle class.
“Worryingly, Indonesia’s educational system is ill-equipped to transform the country’s labor force from low-skilled to high-skilled. Indonesia ranks in the bottom 10 percent in every category of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment rankings,” he added.
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