“Today, we crosschecked all of the data. What is the impact on efforts to reduce imports and what will be the impact on the foreign exchange. […] We were involved in a long discussion about the figures,” he said after attending a meeting at the Office of the Coordinating Economic Minister in Jakarta on Tuesday.

The government introduced a policy on the mandatory use of B20 earlier this month, which is expected to reduce oil imports by US$2.3 billion.

Arcandra said the figure was a whole year target for 2018, while the mandatory policy had only been implemented in September. “Therefore, we need to know the target for the rest of the year. We need to recalculate it,” he added.

Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution said the implementation of the B20 program had not been smooth before the mandatory use policy was introduced, therefore,  it was not easy to measure the success of its implementation before the policy was introduced.

Darmin said the government needed to study all the data about the impact of the policy on efforts to reduce oil imports. “We have not finished [making the calculations]. Therefore, we need to reconcile [the data].  Let us finish the reconciliation first,” he added as quoted by kontan.co.id.

The government is attempting to reduce imports to decrease the current account deficit (CAD).  

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