“Documenting 75 years of resilience” is a series of special reports by The Jakarta Post to celebrate Indonesia’s Independence Day, August 17, 1945.

Indonesia has been relying heavily on commodities to generate trade surpluses for the past 75 years, but volatile prices have pushed the country to diversify exports, while the global pandemic and a trade war haunt future international trade.

The country’s trade surplus peaked at US$39.7 billion in 2007, thanks to exports of, among other things, coal, crude palm oil, rubber, timber, bauxite and nickel.

“Significant increases [in trade surpluses] took place between 2004 and 2011. That was during the commodity boom,” Faisal Basri, an economist at the University of Indonesia, told The Jakarta Post in a phone interview on Aug. 13.

Read also: Indonesia logs biggest trade surplus in nine years, higher exports for three consecutive months

In most of its history, Indonesia enjoyed a trade surplus. It booked only a few trade deficits – such as in 1945, 1952 and 1961 – since its independence.

Indonesia’s trade surplus grew with the oil boom in the 1970s and 1980s, with oil being a key national export commodity at the time.

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