Looking at the composition of the economic team in the Jokowi second term cabinet, it seems that Jokowi needs a very clear economic road map to build the foundation of national economic fundamentals towards Indonesia 2045 that was envisioned in his speech at the inauguration of October 20, 2019. Supervised by Airlangga Hartarto, whose track record is not so good in the process of preventing national deindustrialization in the past five years, Jokowi’s hopes to improve the industrial and service sectors, the manufacturing industry, will be difficult to overcome.
Being asked as minister of industry, Airlangga took many questions about the strategy of increasing the industrial sector in the National GDP, thus encouraging the manufacturing sector to continue to increase, even slipping to 19 percent. Until 2018, the contribution of manufacturing reached 19.86%. However, if look at the trends that occur, it is agreed that manufacturing in the Indonesian economy continues to decline. In fact, it is estimated that under 20% is the first time this year has occurred since 1990. The largest contribution ever made by the manufacturing sector amounted to 31.9% in 2002.
Since then, manufacturing has only been able to contribute an average of 20% to GDP and has continued to decrease compared to the national economic growth. With a large contribution, the manufacturing sector grew below the overall growth average. The current condition began in 2005 where the manufacturing sector corrected a slowdown with growth of 4.5% while the Indonesian economy was still growing at 6.01%. In fact, the previous year manufacturing was able to grow 6.38% when the economy grew 5.03%. Since then, the manufacturing growth trend has always been below average and continues to this day.
Comparatively, in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has a relatively small share of manufacturing compared to other countries. Referring to World Bank data for 2017, Malaysia and Thailand have a higher portion, which are around 22% and 27% of GDP, respectively. Indeed, Indonesia is still superior to the Philippines and Vietnam which recorded 19.6% and 15.3%. So however, it is very understandable why the improvement of the manufacturing industry sector is one of the important keywords in Jokowi’s speech last year to increase overall economic growth. Unfortunately, the selection of figures to sit in the position of the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs is somewhat far from Jokowi’s ideals, considering that Airlangga has not succeeded in breaking the deindustrialization trend that has occurred for years back.
And unfortunately, at the time pandemic comes, his ministry issued pre-employment card that become controversy later on. Seeing how it works, the pre-employment cards launched by the government are more like shopping cards, with the stipulation that some of the funds must be spent on products in the form of videos and materials provided by all designated start-ups, after which they can receive incentives. The problem here, government allocated special budget as part of pre-employment incentives to buy videos which is unnecessary for unemployed at the pandemic. Some even see it as corruptive policy benefiting some of start ups in constitutionally.
Meanwhile, for finance ministry, Sri Mulyani has been surviving with her procyclical and austerity style, efficiency in terms of expenditure and expansion in pursuing tax revenue, and opening wide opportunities for global financing institutions to patch up the national fiscal deficit, even though he doesn’t admit it. This is very understandable, considering the efficiency of spending and the intensification-extensification of tax revenues are the main requirements to get the ease of global debt. It’s just that Sri Mulyani’s style will make the national economy more conservative. Economic growth will remain perched at 5 percent, which incidentally will be difficult to provide a fundamental foundation for Jokowi’s ideals who want to get out of the middle income trap. And amid pandemic, as predicted, Sri Mulyani actually never cut the budgets in massive portion, but widening the budget deficit to open wider space for national depth
In the field of industry and trade, Jokowi has not been able to avoid the politics of accommodation because it must be occupied by two figures whose political background is thick rather than the background of competencies related to their respective fields. They are Agus Gumiwang Kartasasmita for The Ministry of Industry and Agus Suparmanto for The Ministry of Trade. As a result, it is estimated that these two ministries will not give too much change to the facts of Indonesia’s industry and trade going forward, moreover in the middle of pandemic . The symptoms of de-industrialization are expected to be in the previous trend, as well as the condition of the trade deficit that will continue to be swayed between enlargement or reduction of imports, not widening national exports.
Then the presence of Teten Masduki in the Ministry of Cooperatives and SMEs is also quite far from the fire, background and track record of Teten is somewhat unrelated to the field being handled. Inevitably, until this moment, it is unclear where the cooperative sector and SMEs will go. In the pandemic pressures, it is different from the monetary crisis in 1998 where MSMEs actually supported the economy – even exports rose by 350% -, but the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic greatly hit SMEs today. In addition, social restrictions to break the chain of transmission of viruses that spread rapidly among humans also limit the business activities of MSMEs. But the steps taken by the government to increase MSMEs’s endurance are late, not so effective and not really measurable.
It is also not so different with Wisnutama’s presence in the Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy which is a bit disappointing. Wisnutama’s policy platform as well as its competence so far, is no different from the previous minister, Arief Yahya, who played more with tourism imaging such as branding, promotion, and sales. While today, what is needed by the tourism sector is the touch of developing international-class destinations and comprehensive-integrated plan to mature the national tourism ecosystem, so that the tourism sector is integrated with the national economic ecosystem, which is able to increase foreign exchange reserve, increase tourism’s contribution to national GDP, and expand employment opportunities. And in pandemic, this ministry is looked like lost in tourism devastative decreases
So in short, specifically for the economic team, it seems Jokowi is slightly deviated from the ideals he delivered in his inauguration speech. With the composition of the personnel of the second term economic team, Jokowi is not expected to present the achievement of a booming national economic figure. That’s why Indonesia is not really ready dealing with pandemic. While what is needed to deal with demographic bonuses, to get out of the threat of middle income traps, to get out of pandemic pressures right away, it is not enough just to achieve the usual. Normally, Indonesia needs an economic growth rate in progressive percentage to get out of the threat of a middle income trap with the support of fairly high investment growth as well. And now, after plumented economic of first quarter this year, it will really be harder. Therefore, before it is too late, Jokowi really needs to move faster with the right economic team to be out of negative pandemic cycles. And certainly, cabinet reshuffle will not be bad option.
