Speaking before regional leaders, heads of regional legislative councils and other figures convened from all over Indonesia for a conference in Sentul, West Java, Jokowi called on the regional leaders to refrain from issuing too many regulations.

"My message to governors, regents, mayors and the heads of regional legislative councils is this: Don't make too many regional regulations," Jokowi told the Regional Leadership Communication Forum on Wednesday. "This country already has too many regulations. [...] If everything is regulated, we will ensnare ourselves. Enough already."

The former mayor of Surakarta in Central Java also said that all elements of regional governments needed to safeguard any investment commitment in their respective region, so that investment plans could be realized swiftly.

As of September this year, realized investment has reached Rp 601.3 trillion (US$42.89 billion), a 12.3 percent increase from the corresponding period of last year, according to the Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM), with foreign direct investment rising 8.2 percent to Rp 317.8 trillion.

The investment realized from January to September represents 75.9 percent of the BKPM’s full-year target to attract Rp 792 trillion from both domestic and foreign investors.

The government has been striving to attract more investment to the country to help spur the economic growth, which slowed to its lowest level in more than two years in the third quarter. The growth of investment, which accounts for around a third of the country’s gross domestic product, slumped to 4.21 percent in the third quarter from 6.96 recorded in the same period last year, Statistics Indonesia data show.

Indonesian Employers Association public policy chairman Sutrisno Iwantono said an overlapping authority between the central government and regional administrations was one of the problems hampering business activity. Regulations issued by the government, he added, often could not be promptly implemented at the regional level due to bureaucratic issues.

In cases of overlapping authority, “the central government should simplify and standardize [regulations],” Sutrisno said, advising the government to remove complicated regional regulations.

Sprawling regulations are among the issues identified by the World Bank in its assessment of Indonesia’s competitiveness as it identified a rising trend in the number of regulations issued by the government.

More than 6,300 ministerial regulations were issued from 2015 to 2018, up from 5,000 ministerial regulations issued from 2011 to 2014, according to data compiled by the World Bank and presented to Jokowi in September.

Regional Autonomy Watch executive director Robert Endi Jaweng said any deregulation effort should be started by the central government before it is followed by regional administrations. The latter, he went on to say, usually issued derivative regulations as mandated by the higher laws.

“Reforms of regulations and licensing [procedures] should be started upstream, particularly by the ministries or government institutions that lead [regulating processes in certain areas],” said Robert.

Standardizing licensing procedures through further improvement of the Online Single Submission system was the key for regional administrations to toe the central government’s line in its deregulation effort, he added.

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