00074918.2012.654487

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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

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Book reviews

Stephen Howes , Hal Hill & Antje Missbach

To cite this article: Stephen Howes , Hal Hill & Antje Missbach (2012) Book reviews, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 48:1, 105-110, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2012.654487

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Published online: 14 Mar 2012.

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ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/12/010105-6 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2012.654487

BOOK REVIEWS

Chris Manning and Sudarno Sumarto (2011) Employment, Living Standards and Poverty in Contemporary Indonesia, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, pp. xx + 363. Cloth: S$49.90/US$39.90; Paper: S$29.90/US$24.90.

This volume of papers originated with the September 2010 Indonesia Update, an annual event held at the the Australian National University in Canberra. It is a comprehensive collection of recent research around the topic of poverty reduc-tion, broadly deined, in Indonesia. Poverty is multi-dimensional, and so is this volume, with chapters on just about everything that goes into successful pov-erty reduction, from growth and pricing policy to employment and migration, to health, education and sanitation, and to social safety nets.

It is impossible to do justice to the book’s 16 chapters and 363 pages in the scope of a single review. Beyond commending the book as an excellent starting point for anyone working on poverty reduction, broadly conceived, in Indonesia or the region, I will conine myself to making ive general points.

First, Indonesia emerges from the book as a fascinating blend of success and failure. On the one hand, it shows fairly steady poverty reduction, and reasonable human development indicators compared with its neighbours. It has introduced cash transfers to provide a safety net, and has one of the world’s largest com-munity development programs. On the other hand, it continues to struggle to rein in fuel subsidies, which are both huge and hugely regressive. And its policy of restricting rice imports also hurts the poor. All this is documented in various chapters of the book. On balance, one comes away feeling optimistic – at least I did. Perhaps success in development is ensuring that there are successes to coun-terbalance the inevitable policy failures.

Second, the policies of decentralisation that Indonesia has pursued since Soe-harto’s demise appear to have failed the poor. The conclusion by Adi Perdana and John Maxwell, in their chapter on the evolution of poverty alleviation poli-cies, that decentralisation ‘is not yet operating to its full potential as a means of reducing poverty’ (p. 289) is too kind. Their own chapter documents the failure of local governments ‘to deliver public goods as expected’ (p. 286). And Daniel Suryadarma gives an account in his chapter on education of ‘the negative aspects’ (p. 180) of decentralisation, which clearly outweigh the ‘few positive aspects’ (p. 181). Getting the system of local governments to work better emerges from this volume as a key challenge for poverty reduction in Indonesia.

Third, I read this book just after reading Charles Kenny’s Getting Better (Basic Books, 2011), an optimistic account of global development. Kenny argues, among other things, that because we don’t really know how to accelerate growth, aid agencies should focus instead on the social sectors, where the recipe for success is

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106 Book reviews

more clearly known. I came away from the book under review thinking that actu-ally we know less about what makes for improvements in the delivery of social services than we do about what causes and can accelerate economic growth. The early papers on growth, employment, prices and poverty provide convincing explanations for recent poverty trends. The subsequent chapters on health and education are far more open-ended.

Daniel Suryadarma’s chapter on education starts with the dual facts that Indonesia has done well in getting children into school but that the quality of education is poor. He provides a long list of reforms attempted in Indonesia and elsewhere that aim to lift quality, but – and this is not a criticism of the chapter – there appears to be little evidence as to which reforms are the more important, or the more likely to work.

The chapter on health by Adrian Hayes and Nida Harahap also provides lit-tle actionable guidance for policy makers. ‘Poor governance’, the authors argue, ‘continues to thwart many of the best efforts at improving performance and serv-ing the poor’ (p. 219). Unless there is ‘extensive civil service reform’, it is ‘hard to imagine’ how the bureaucracy as a whole ‘can serve the people of Indonesia much more effectively’ (p. 219). But extensive civil service reform is hardly a policy pre-scription that will inspire conidence, given the dificulty of the task and the track record in this area in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Fourth, though one has to go to the very last page of the book to discover this, the volume is in fact the 22nd Indonesia Update volume since 1988. The related

conference is the 28th in the series.) The Indonesia Project itself, which is the

spon-sor of these annual ‘Updates’, has been in existence, in various guises, since 1965. This volume – with its high quality and splendid mix of Indonesian and inter-national authors – is further evidence of the success and ongoing relevance of the Indonesia Project. The Independent Review of Aid Effectiveness (in which I par-ticipated) recently highlighted the Indonesia Project as one of AusAID’s most suc-cessful research projects. It has many of the features typical of aid success stories: a genuine partnership – in this case both with the ANU as an institution and with a group of committed scholars – and longevity – the Project has been receiving direct support from the Australian government for more than 30 years.

Finally, while it is good that the book is available online at the publisher’s web-site, individual chapters have to be downloaded at a price. This no doubt will reduce readership. Journals are increasingly open access, and books will have to follow suit if they are to compete. In this regard, the annual China Update, another ANU offering, which produces a book available for sale in hard copy and free of charge in soft, is a model worth emulating.

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Anthony Welch (2011) Higher Education in Southeast Asia: Blurring Borders, Changing Balance, Routledge, London, pp. 195 + ix. Cloth: US$140.00; £85.00.

This volume, by an education specialist at the University of Sydney, addresses the ‘dilemma of higher education in Southeast Asia’ with reference to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The author refers to several useful taxonomies of the functions of universities, one including training highly skilled labour; acting as a ‘social sorting mechanism’; forming and disseminating state ideology (and social norms more generally); and generating new knowl-edge. This study is set against the backdrop of rapid educational growth in these countries, the increasing cost of higher education, and concern about the rising exodus of skilled workers from poor countries; the rise of private provision of ter-tiary education; widespread fraud and corruption associated with the governance of public universities and the regulation of private institutions; and the expand-ing internationalisation of universities.

The book leads off with an overview of the issues, continues with detailed studies of the ive countries, and concludes with a summary. Readers of this jour-nal will be especially interested in the chapter on Indonesia. There is a useful review of the country’s higher education, set in the context of colonial neglect, luid post-1998 politics and unequal access to post-secondary education. About half the chapter is devoted to ‘current and future issues in higher education’. The brief discussion of quality emphasises low levels of faculty remuneration, low staff–student ratios and poor equipment. There is also reference to low levels of transparency in reporting systems, to the government’s limited regulatory reach, and to the struggle to inance higher education while also meeting tolerable equity targets. A range of international collaborative arrangements is examined. This is the most thorough recent treatment of Indonesian tertiary education this reviewer is aware of, although it would have been strengthened by a greater focus on how all these well-known challenges might be addressed.

The other four country chapters provide similar coverage, also in the context of the historical background and current economic and political environment. In Malaysia, it is the ‘quest for the best’, within the constraints of that country’s complex ethnic-based political economy. The chapter on Thailand worries about poor quality and historically low public investment in all sectors of education. In the Philippines, higher education is almost entirely the preserve of the private sec-tor, and the market has responded mainly with low cost–quality offerings. Mean-while, the once pre-eminent public university, the multi-campus University of the Philippines, faces chronically low funding and constraints on its fee levels. Viet-nam suffers from the opposite problem of the state placing higher education in a rigid regulatory framework, with a few notable exceptions such as Melbourne’s RMIT University venture in Ho Chi Minh City.

The concluding chapter returns to some of the key messages: very rapid enrol-ment growth; the aspiration for elite universities in the region to become ‘world class’ in some sense, but the large gap between them and the established western universities; the growth of the private sector; the tendency for admission to be based on non-academic criteria (mainly family wealth); and various forms of poor governance and corruption.

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108 Book reviews

Overall, the tone of the volume is rather gloomy: in Asia, ‘[t]he gap between the rich and poor continues to increase’ (the evidence is in fact mixed, and varies across the ive countries, as elsewhere). There are also said to be ‘profound inequalities in the cross-border trade in educational services’. While this is undoubtedly cor-rect, in the mostly high-growth Southeast Asian economies, economic catch-up is also providing the opportunity for educational catch-up.

The value of this volume lies in its scope and comparative analysis, its sub-stantial country detail, its emphasis on the rapidity of change in Southeast Asian higher education, and its connection to the broader international education litera-ture. In this, the author does a better job of laying out the challenges than of advis-ing how some hard choices might be addressed. For example, policy advisers will look in vain for advice on (1) how to achieve rapidly rising enrolments with limited budgets; (2) how to balance equity and eficiency goals; (3) how heavily – if at all – tertiary education should be subsidised, and what priority it should be accorded relative to primary and secondary education; and (4) how to construct credible systems of teaching and research evaluation and quality assurance with weak public administration.

A second printing of the volume would enable the author to clean up some minor editorial blemishes, such as ‘University of Malaysia’, ‘Gadjah Madah University’, ‘Banten province in East Java’, and the reference to the book as an ‘article’. It would also be an opportunity to update the data series, most of which end at or before 2006.

The Indonesian Institute (2011) Indonesia 2010, The Indonesian Institute, Center for Public Policy Research, Jakarta, pp. x + 102. Rp 70,000 (print);

avail-able for free download from <http://www.theindonesianinstitute.com>.

Since 2005, the Indonesian Institute, an independent think-tank based in Jakarta, has published an annual collection of essays dealing with some of Indonesia’s most pressing current issues. The 2010 edition concentrates on ive topics: Presi-dent Yudhoyono’s fragile governing coalition; special autonomy in Aceh and Papua; the increasingly troublesome bilateral relations between Indonesia and Malaysia; the handling of natural disasters; and the role of the state in regard to religious tolerance.

All of the essays offer valuable insights from an insider’s point of view. How-ever, as an outsider, I would have appreciated more rigorous criticism. In particu-lar, the irst essay by Hanta Yuda A.R. on ‘Yudhoyono’s presidency’, which gives special attention to the 2009 cabinet reshufle, is rather descriptive and sometimes even speculative. In his analysis, Hanta Yuda concludes that SBY’s presidential stance was weakened by ‘barter politics’ among members of the ruling coalition. Although Yuda singles out the opportunistic behaviour of the political parties and the mismanagement of communication as the main causes of this weakening, his recommendations at the end of the chapter, about re-designing the election

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tem, the parliament and even the presidency as a political institution, seem to be completely detached from this prior analysis.

Although the essays lean more towards providing policy advice than offer-ing strictly academic analysis, greater attention to bibliographic references would have been helpful. The interested reader is often left with little idea of the authors’ sources. This is especially true for the chapter by Aly Yusuf on the ‘Adapting special autonomy for Papua and Aceh’. Apart from mentioning a number of legal sources, Yusuf provides few facts and igures to support his claims. Those few ig-ures provided often concern only the years before 2010. The author leaves largely unanswered the question of why special autonomy could not reduce poverty in Papua to the extent that it did in Aceh. Not surprisingly, his recommendations remain rather vague.

In the third essay, ‘Disentangling the roots of the Indonesia–Malaysia conlict’, Benni Inayatullah analyses three problem ields: border disputes; the lack of pro-tection for overseas migrant workers; and competing cultural heritage claims. The irst problem especially requires some historical background to allow the reader to grasp the signiicance of the larger underlying conlict, which may otherwise be seen as concerning only some small islands on the border. Inayatullah’s his-torical overview is, however, disproportionately long. Instead it would have been more useful to concentrate on how the two governments can ind the urgently needed political solutions that could improve the lives of the millions of Indo-nesian migrant workers based in Malaysia.

Unlike his co-writers, Endang Srihadi makes use of a meticulous and up-to-date set of data in ‘The problems of handling natural disasters’. After an overview of loods, earthquakes and hurricanes all over Indonesia, Srihadi concentrates on post-disaster management in three areas: Wasior (a landslide); Mentawai (a tsunami); and Merapi (a volcanic eruption). The focus of this straightforward analysis is a number of shortcomings in the handling of natural and man-made disasters, such as insuficient infrastructure, ill-deined responsibilities and a lack of competence and precautionary planning. Srihadi paints a gloomy picture of the prospects of preventing future man-made disasters and minimising disaster risk and damage.

The last chapter, ‘The role of the state in religious tolerance’, by Antonius Wiwan Koban, deserves special mention, because the author does not shy away from calling the growing intolerance towards religious minorities by its true name. At irst he lists a couple of dozen cases in which religious ceremonies were violently interrupted; the erection of religious buildings and symbols was interrupted or prevented; or churches were burnt down. He then analyses four cases: violent acts against members of the heterodox Ahmadiyah group; the forced dismantling of a Buddha statue in Tanjung Balai; the prohibition of a cultural event in Wonogiri that had been celebrated for many years previously; and the prevention of the construction of a Bima statue in Purwakerta. These cases are offered as evidence for the author’s claim that religious intolerance towards minorities increased both quantitatively and qualitatively in 2010. Finally, he lists a number of new and old pieces of legislation that support discrimination against religious minorities.

The last two chapters in particular demonstrate that some of Indonesia’s think-tanks are staffed by critical minds. Since all of the contributors to Indonesia 2010 are still relatively young, we can expect to read more and sharper analyses in

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coming years. In future editions of these annual reports it would be useful if the publisher were to add a glossary and a bibliography, and to provide better edit-ing, since some chapters contain a signiicant number of typographical errors.