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Jakarta Post
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Taxing the barber will not close Indonesia’s revenue gap

Small businesses are  brought into the the tax net once the state shows them what registration buys. Indonesia offers that deal only to its bigger borrowers.  

19 hours ago
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Indonesia has a new data law. Now comes the hard part

Passing the SDI Law is only the beginning. The real challenge is in translating national standards into operational practices across the country's vast and diverse government institutions.  ...

20 hours ago
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Haze crisis tests public trust and diplomatic credibility

The recurring fires in Kalimantan, Sumatra and Papua point to a deeper governance challenge: the ability of the state to prevent environmental disasters, enforce accountability and protect the people who bear their consequences. ...

21 hours ago

The Latest

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Veep drama

With his elevation to the country's second-highest executive office being the outcome of political interference from his father, then-president Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, it was only a matter of time before his critics and detractors started to litigate the process.

21 hours ago
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ASEAN: From regional cooperation to global climate action

Facing acute climate risks, ASEAN is taking its united front to COP31, turning regional solidarity into global action for a resilient and sustainable future.

22 hours ago
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Analysis: Indonesia’s digital tax: Welcome, but not enough

Hashim Djojohadikusumo's recent remarks about tapping the Rp 10,000 trillion shadow economy have renewed attention on the government's efforts to expand digital tax collection. While the measure could generate additional revenue, it is unlikely to address the structural weaknesses underlying Indonesia's fiscal challenges.

22 hours ago
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Middle powers standing together in a patchy world

Bound by deep cultural roots and shared vulnerabilities, the Netherlands and Indonesia prove that middle powers hold the key to defending a fragmented global order.

22 hours ago
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When politicians claim success, statisticians take the blame

A low unemployment rate does not prove policy success when the burden of survival has simply been outsourced to struggling families.

1 day ago
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The Watergate redux: Building a strong, accountable cyber state

As modern cyber defense expands, the enduring lesson of Watergate is clear: powerful state surveillance is only as strong as the legal guardrails and ethical oversight that govern it.

1 day ago
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The purge, distraction and the new era of police weaponization

What is taking place in the capital is a calculated, elite power struggle, a high-stakes game of political chess played entirely out of earshot of the tens of million Indonesians.

1 day ago
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The case against Indonesia’s bid for WHO leadership

National pride cannot replace scrutiny: Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin’s domestic track record on judicial overreach, data governance and fractured medical trust makes him the wrong choice to lead the WHO.

1 day ago
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Analysis: Lemigas: Streamlining energy imports or shifting power?

The government plans to shift energy import procurement from Pertamina to the Oil and Gas Testing Center, or Lemigas, a public service agency (BLU) under the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry. The move could reshape control over the country's lucrative energy trade. The government argues that direct negotiations with supplier countries will speed up procurement, eliminate intermediaries and secure supplies, but will the new arrangement bring greater transparency and a shorter supply chain or merely add another industry player?

1 day ago
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The Grain Initiative and the safety of shipping in the Black Sea

Challenging Western narratives on global food security, the Russian Embassy exposes the real bottlenecks in the Black Sea and outlines why Indonesia’s supply chain resilience lies in diversification, not geopolitical rhetoric.

1 day ago
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Not a true cooperative

The Red and White Cooperatives program is becoming increasingly all-encompassing, yet it remains anything but a genuine cooperative.

1 day ago
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ASEAN Summit: Between promises and elusive progress

Behind Manila’s polished communiqués and ribbon-cutting ceremonies lies an institutional facade that can no longer mask ASEAN's failure to govern a region in crisis.

2 days ago
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Carbon recycling: A climate game-changer or costly distraction?

Turning emissions into valuable industrial goods sounds like a climate game-changer, but for Indonesia, carbon recycling is neither an outright silver bullet nor an affordable fix, unless policymakers learn to separate viable solutions from costly distractions.

2 days ago
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Mahasewa and the commodification of the Youth Pledge

The true moral failing lies with the orchestrators, the political elites who exploit this poverty, handing out costumes to the disenfranchised to ensure the "play" goes on flawlessly under the sacred banner of the Youth Pledge.

2 days ago
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MAGA’s midterm defeat won’t change the course of history

The world must not succumb to euphoria following Donald Trump’s latest defeat. If anything, his lame-duck status deprives Americans and everyone else of an excuse for avoiding hard conversations about the truly radical changes that will be needed to avert future catastrophes.

2 days ago
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Biodiesel: Don’t move too fast, build the ecosystem first

Indonesia has ramped up its biodiesel blend to B50 from B30 just in four years, but feedstock, engines, forests and infrastructure have not kept pace. Brazil and Malaysia remind us why sequencing matters.

2 days ago
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The micro foundations of Indonesia’s growth

Seen from the ground up, careful households, busy factories and confident investors explain Indonesia’s 5.47 percent growth, while the next gains will depend on jobs and exports.

2 days ago
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Analysis: Indonesia, Singapore’s ties hit another diplomatic rough patch

Indonesia and Singapore maintain a relationship best compared to that of siblings: deeply interdependent with shared strategic interests, yet periodically strained by sharp divergences in perspective.

2 days ago
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Cracks behind growth

Indonesia’s robust 5.47 percent growth looks impressive on paper, but weakening consumer spending, rising unemployment and a strained state budget suggest the headline boom may be masking serious trouble ahead.

2 days ago
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Bloodbath: Trump's Republicans may not recover until 2032

The 2026 midterms weren’t just a brutal defeat for Donald Trump, they may have locked the Republican Party out of power until 2032.

3 days ago
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Progress achieved, promise unfulfilled: Eradicating poverty in Asia-Pacific

Poverty in Asia and the Pacific concentrates among large rural households and in remote areas, among people with little or no education, among children, among informal workers and among women.. 

3 days ago
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Build the bridge for peatland restoration

Greater international cooperation is essential to mobilize financial resources, technical expertise and institutional support to ensure that burned landscapes are restored effectively.

3 days ago
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When state capitalism fails to keep destructive entrepreneurs at bay

Adopting aggressive state capitalism without a strong state monitoring capacity leaves the strategy vulnerable to capture by politically connected rent-seekers.

3 days ago
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The unemployment rate is falling, rural distress is not

Indonesia's falling unemployment rate looks like an economic triumph, until you realize the country’s poorest villages have the lowest joblessness, masking a hollowed-out manufacturing sector and millions driven into survival farming.

3 days ago
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Beyond elite conflicts: How state surveillance swept up lives

A massive wiretapping scandal targeting over 6,000 people, ranging from politicians to activists, reveals that Indonesia’s surveillance apparatus isn't just guarding the state. It's systematically dismantling democracy from the shadows.

3 days ago
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Analysis: We have not seen the full political fallout of the police scandal

The detention of former National Police chief Gen. Listyo Sigit Prabowo on allegations of illegal wiretapping has become one of the most consequential political scandals in recent Indonesian history. Yet the country has probably not seen its full fallout. If anything, the affair is only beginning to reveal how deeply police power penetrated the political system and how weak oversight and accountability have become.

3 days ago
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The path to a law-abiding nation

Will Indonesia become a society governed by the rule of law or a country coopted by the interests of its ambitious leaders? It is high time for President Prabowo Subianto and lawmakers to decide. 

3 days ago

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