A

fter meetings with businesspeople and key economic policy makers, President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo has promised to offer many new incentives and to further deregulate industry in order to prop up an economy experiencing its slowest growth rate in six years.

Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution said on Thursday that the President had addressed various matters during the meeting, including a plan to introduce more packages of policies designed to jump start the economy and to attract foreign exchange.

However, Darmin stopped short of revealing details of the policies that he said would include a mixture of tax incentives and other policies to help manufacturing industries.

'€œWhat I can say now is that the President has composed a list of policies and asked that most of them be implemented starting next week.'€

Darmin only hinted that the policies were related to the real estate and finance sectors, involving a new tax holiday plan and deregulation.

The call for the meeting came in the wake of '€œBlack Monday'€, during which the stock market plunged by more than 4 percent and the rupiah slid past its psychological level of 14,000 against the US dollar.

Aside from the impact of so-called quantitative easing in the US, the slowdown in China, Indonesia'€™s biggest trading partner, also fuelled Monday'€™s carnage.

Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro said that the recent issuance of a tax holiday regulation was a '€œwarm-up'€ before the government revealed the full package.

'€œWhat we aim to do is to boost manufacturing to ensure stability while at the same time maintaining people'€™s purchasing power,'€ he said.

He added that the policies were already in the making and that he hoped to introduce them next week.

The Finance Ministry already issued tax holidays of up to 20 years for companies engaged in so-called '€œpioneering industries'€.

Industry Minister Saleh Husin said that a local unit of Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever would be the first to receive the facility because its new plant in the Sei Mangke special economic zone in North Sumatra was considered to be part of a pioneering industry.

'€œThe plant has pioneered the processing of agricultural produce, in this case palm oil, into value-added goods,'€ said Saleh.

According to Saleh, aside from Unilever there were another 11 companies currently in the process of getting the tax holiday.

'€œPT Oki Pulp and Paper Mills is the latest one on the list,'€ he said.

Oki, a unit of Sinarmas Group'€™s Asia Pulp and Paper, is currently constructing the country'€™s biggest pulp mill in North Sumatra at a cost of US$2.6 billion, mostly financed by the China Development Bank.

With the planned incentives, Jokowi has assured the business community of the government'€™s presence and commitment during this tumultuous period in a meeting with businesspeople and representatives from business associations and law enforcement agencies.

'€œThe President continues to synchronize efforts to solve economic problems,'€ said State Secretary Pratikno after the meeting that lasted for more than two hours.

'€œThe bottom line is that we, as a nation, are consolidating forces to face the global economic turmoil, which inevitably has become a shared responsibility, not just the government'€™s,'€ he added.

Central Bank Governor Agus Martowardojo, who had a separate meeting with Jokowi, said that BI'€™s full-year economic growth outlook would remain at between 4.7 percent and 5.1 percent.

'€œWe expect that the government will speed up spending in the second half, commence its numerous infrastructure projects and attract new investments. We will probably grow, at the most, 4.9 percent this year.'€

Former finance minister Chatib Basri, now a senior fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, suggested the government focus on providing fiscal stimulus to middle and low-income people as a short-term solution this year because infrastructure-related work would take time to create jobs.

'€œThe government should extend programs, such as cash transfers or cash for work through labor-intensive projects, that will not disrupt the current-account deficit. Village road construction is an example,'€ he said.