The first package, launched at the beginning of the year, was meant to alleviate the pain of a value-added tax hike, even though the latter was eventually watered down to almost nothing.

It included tax cuts on flour, sugar and cooking oil, food aid for households categorized as poor, electricity discounts for some, partial VAT waivers for home and car purchases and income tax cuts for some employees in certain industries.

All of those temporary measures came with terms and conditions that made the whole thing confusing for both consumers and public officials.

It is impossible to know how effective that package was in lifting household spending, let alone gauge its overall economic impact. What we know for sure is that it was costly.

The second stimulus package aimed to amplify summer holiday spending after a disappointing first-quarter GDP reading.

It focused on transportation subsidies through discounts or tax cuts on rail and sea trips, airfares and road tolls, but it also included a temporary boost in social aid through cash transfers and rice distribution, as well as targeted wage subsidies, discounts on workplace accident insurance for workers in some industries and more.

This most recent package differs, in a good way, from the previous two, in that it includes paid internships and other programs related to job creation, which means it goes beyond the short-term effect generally associated with the term “stimulus”.

The internship program aims to match new graduates with industries, according to Coordinating Economy Minister Airlangga Hartarto, with the program’s first stage to target 20,000 beneficiaries over a six-month period on a total budget of Rp 198 billion.

Whether many of the interns will get permanent jobs is anyone’s guess. Ideally, they would pick up practical skills to make them a better fit for vacancies, but if there are not many vacancies, the effort will yield little.

Yet, putting money in people’s pockets while also tackling a structural problem, in this case the lack of skills, is a wiser use of state funds than only putting money in people’s pockets.

As they say, give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, and you add a job to the economy.

Furthermore, the latest package takes aim at another structural issue in Indonesia’s economy, red tape, through the integration of the Online Single Submission (OSS) licensing system with regional regulations on spatial planning.

Odd that this is part of the stimulus package, as it does not meet the definition of economic stimulus, but as long as it addresses a real-world problem for businesses, nobody should complain.

The programs in the latest package differ widely in their economic approach, targeted beneficiaries and duration, and they include many classic stimulus efforts, such as income tax relief for employees of hotels, restaurants and cafes.

The hospitality industry was hard hit by budget cuts earlier this year that reduced spending on government outings, so we feel happy for the people helped, but it is hardly a sustainable way to keep an economy running.

In many ways, it is a distraction from structural problems.

We are not in an acute crisis like five years ago, when a pandemic forced much business activity to a screeching halt. Monetary and fiscal stimulus made good sense then.

What we have, rather, is an economy that is not as strong as it could be.

We have the time to fix it systematically by changing regulations to facilitate business activity and thereby invite more investment, instead of running back-to-back stimulus packages providing short-term fuel.

That is what the government should focus on.