With more than 1,200 participants from across the country, the two-day National Summit that ended Friday evening seemed simply to reflect President Susilo Bambang Yudhuyono’s character as a politician who always does his best to appease everyone and offend no one at the expense of any real action.
At first glance, discussions at the gathering, which was attended by Cabinet ministers, senior officials, provincial governors, regents, mayors, national and regional legislators and representatives of civil society organizations and industrial and trade associations, appeared to ramble, jumping from economic problems, to security and defense issues and then touching on education, law enforcement and almost any issue under the sun.
Yet the meeting, though symbolic of the participatory process with which Yudhoyono embarked on his second presidential term, produced hundreds of policy recommendations for improving the 100-day and five-year development programs he is finalizing.
We have to wait for a few more days before the government announces its 100-day programs of action. But the President seems to be fully aware that the 100-day programs of action are quite important to build up public confidence in his new Cabinet, which received only a lukewarm reception from the market.
The government therefore would focus on actions with immediate and strong impact. Hence, bold measures with direct or indirect effect on the economic sector will most likely be the top priority.
There appeared to be no clear picture of how the various individual policy recommendations hang together to show the broad direction in which the economy will be steered.
But it was encouraging to observe how Chief economics minister Hatta Radjasa, in his briefings to reporters, in between the sessions during the summit, talked about the right things, covering almost all the basic problems affecting the economy and the most essential elements of policy instruments to cope with these problems.
He cited bold programs in logistics to smoothen the flow of goods, to resolve the problems of land acquisition for basic infrastructure projects, to facilitate the ease of doing business, all with the objective to improve the overall efficiency of the economy and woo investment to generate jobs and alleviate poverty.
He even cited the need for a government regulation in-lieu-of-law to remove regulatory and bureaucratic barriers to land acquisition which have delayed dozens of infrastructure projects such as toll roads, seaports and airports, power plants and transmission lines.
Efficient logistics management requires efficient transport and port-handling systems as well as their auxiliary services such as customs and freight forwarding. Without efficient logistics Indonesia will remain a high-cost economy, and not be able to become part of the global supply-chain, and hence be shunned by investors.
An efficient logistics system needs greatly increased co-ordination of transport by road, rail, sea, air and more recently, also by an entirely new route to market-- the Internet, to turn the world’s largest archipelago country into one united economy.
At present crumbling road infrastructure and an acute shortage of shipping services, make the major islands as if they were separate economic zones.
Its performance within the next 100 days will determine the level of the government’s technocratic capacity to translate its promises into operational policies and the effectiveness of its parliamentary coalition in accelerating its reform agenda to remove regulatory, legal and bureaucratic barriers to overall economic efficiency.
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