Former mayor made Yogya best ranked for start-ups

When the International Finance Corporation named Yogyakarta the best place to do business in Indonesia earlier this year, many people wanted to know why.

The answer, according to the Independent Regional Autonomy Watch (KPPOD), was the leadership of the city under its recently departed mayor, Herry Zudianto.

Yogyakarta topped the list of a survey of 20 cities conducted by the IFC and the KPPOD as part of a report titled “Doing Business in Indonesia 2012”.

According to the IFC, Yogyakarta would have been ranked fourth in the world if it had been included in a survey of major global business centers.

“The mayor took his job seriously in creating the one-stop service system in Yogyakarta ,” KPPOD executive director Robert Endi Jaweng said during a media discussion. “He went all out in his second term to
accomplish the job.”

Herry left office in July after completing two five-year terms and has since kept a low public profile.

A businessman by training, Herry slashed the number of steps needed to obtain a new business permit in Yogyakarta to seven, compared to the national average of 10.

Other cities topping the IFC’s list were Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan; and Yogyakarta’s nearby neighbor of Surakarta, Central Java. At the bottom of the list were Manado, North Sulawesi; and Medan, North Sumatra.

Endi said the one-stop service system fared worse in cities such as Makassar, Batam, Jambi and Mataram, where relevant agencies had been given limited administrative authority while the real power to issue licenses remained with several other agencies.

The KPPOD also said that many regency and city administrations continued to impose administrative fees that might deter investors from starting up new businesses in their regions, singling out Banda Aceh, Denpasar and Gorontalo as examples.

He said Gorontalo, Manado and Pekanbaru also charged fiscal fees, which had never been imposed by the central government in the first place.