Addressing Indonesia’s Infrastructure Deficit

Between September 2015 and February 2016, the government of President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) unveiled 10 economic policy packages in an effort to promote deregulation and support investment in key sectors. Foreign investors, at whom many of these measures are directed, have viewed the packages with a mix of cautious optimism and healthy scepticism. Investors have often heard Jokowi announce that Indonesia welcomes foreign capital, only to see these commitments countermanded by the actions of ministers and officials wanting more restrictive regulations and practices. It therefore remains uncertain whether these announcements and policy packages will lead to actual reform.

One area in which the government is showing both intent and progress is infrastructure. Decades of under-investment and poor asset management have left Indonesia with a major infrastructure deficit, the economic and social costs of which are substantial. There are encouraging signs, however. Jokowi’s administration is continuing its agenda of fiscal reform, shifting budget allocations away from energy subsidies and towards capital spending; investment approvals in infrastructure are rising fast; and the country’s four largest construction firms have reported a large jump in the value of government-awarded contracts. Recent months have also seen the completion of the Makassar–Parepare segment of the Trans-Sulawesi railway and the first stage of the New Priok Port at Tanjung Priok, while the long-awaited Umbulan Springs project, which will supply water to Surabaya and surrounding areas, has been awarded to a preferred bidder.

Demonstrating rapid progress in delivering infrastructure is clearly important to the Jokowi administration, but longer-term challenges remain. For one, Indonesia’s inefficient planning and delivery model for national roads needs to be overhauled if the country is to safeguard its economic growth. The government has yet to fully tackle this and other long-term reforms; it has, however, recently introduced regulations that augur well for new flows of private investment, such as reinstating the role of such investment in the water sector and allowing for a more realistic risk allocation in public–private partnerships.     

Redefining the Human Development Index to Account for Sustainability

Earlier measures of growth like Gross Domestic Product per capita, or even more recent measures like the Human Development Index (HDI), failed to consider the ‘environmental’ aspect of development. Currently, countries that have accepted the sustainability challenge are finding ways to determine if they are making progress in a sustainable way by addressing the environmental aspect of development. This paper attempts to improve the HDI by adding an ‘ecological footprint to total bio-capacity ratio’ as an indicator of environmental resource use. This new index, the Environmentally Stressed Human Development Index (ESHDI) while trying to account for sustainable development, dramatically alters the original HDI rankings of countries. Some ‘high’ and ‘medium’ income countries are enduring excessive environmental stress to sustain economic development.     

Experiments in farmers' collectives in Eastern India and Nepal: Process,benefits, and challenges

Do farmers' collectives, which pool land, labour, capital, and skills to create medium‐sized production units, offer a more viable model of farming for resource‐constrained smallholders than individual family farms? A participatory action research project in Eastern India and Nepal provides notable answers. Groups of marginal and tenant farmers, catalysed by the project, evolved into four different collective models with varying levels of cooperation, gender composition, and land ownership/tenancy status. Based on 3 years of action research, this paper examines how the models evolved and their differential outcomes. All groups have gained from cultivating contiguous plots in their efficiency of labour and machine use for land preparation and irrigation, and from economies in input purchase. Several collectives of tenant farmers have also enhanced their bargaining power vis‐a‐vis an entrenched landlord class and thus been able to negotiate lower rents and refuse long‐standing feudal obligations. However, the models differ in their extent of economic gain and their ability to handle gender inequalities and conflicts over labour sharing. The paper explores the historical, regional, and cultural factors that could explain such differences across the models. It thus offers unique insights into the processes, benefits, and challenges of farmers' collectives and provides pointers for replication and further research.     

Towards mentoring the Indian organizational woman: Propositions,considerations, and first steps

The globalized Indian economy creates employment opportunity for educated Indian women and increases gender diversity in Indian Enterprises (IEs). Increased gender diversity presents myriad challenges for integrating women into the managerial ranks of IEs. We highlight these challenges, offer propositions on the Indian culture, the status of women within IEs, and formal mentoring as a human resource development initiative. Further, we use social identity theory as a lens for understanding these challenges, and integrate knowledge from the Western literature on mentoring women. We conclude by suggesting first steps for developing formal mentoring programs aimed at the Indian organizational woman.     

The yield curve in a small open economy

Long-term nominal interest rates in a number of inflation-targeting small open economies have tended to be strongly correlated with those of the United States. This observation has recently led support to the view that, in these economies, the long-end of the yield curve has decoupled from its short-end and naturally to a concern that monetary policy may have lost some of its autonomy. We set up and estimate a two-country small open economy model in which the expectations hypothesis and uncovered interest rate parity hold to study the co-movement of long-term nominal interest rates of different currencies. We show that differences in the persistence of domestic and foreign disturbances, a hypothesis for which we find support in recent data, can explain the observed pattern of correlations. These correlations are not evidence of weaker monetary policy.     

Alternatives to Paying Child Benefit to the Rich: Means-Testing or Higher Tax?

There appears to be a general movement away from universal child benefits and towards means-testing. In the present article we argue that instead of suppressing the labour supply of middle-income parents by withdrawing the transfer as a function of income, one should consider the alternative of financing a generous universal child benefit by increasing taxation of income. The implications of means-testing compared with a tax-financed universal alternative are discussed analytically in a piecewise linear schedule and by combining information from behavioural and non-behavioural micro-simulation models. Our results provide support for making child benefit universal instead of means-tested.