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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
Hadi Soesastro: Sebuah Antologi Pemikiran
Howard Dick
To cite this article: Howard Dick (2013) Hadi Soesastro: Sebuah Antologi Pemikiran, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 49:1, 119-121, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2013.772944
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.772944
Published online: 21 Mar 2013.
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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2013: 119–25
ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/13/010119-7
BOOK REVIEWS
Mochamad Pasha (ed.) (2011) Hadi Soesastro: Sebuah Antologi Pemikiran, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta, pp. xxx + 460. Paper: Rp 165,750.
The late Hadi Soesastro (1945–2010) was for several decades one of Indone -sia’s brightest minds and most inluential thinkers. As an economist, he was an insightful policy analyst; he was also a subtle and effective second-track diplo -mat in regional forums. Yet, unlike most of his peers, he never held a full-time university appointment or a ministerial or bureaucratic position, though he was widely consulted and highly valued as an adviser. Except for periods of second-ment, Soesastro spent his entire career at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which he joined as a research fellow on its establishment, in 1971, and also served several terms as its executive director. CSIS was Indonesia’s irst policy think-tank, created by presidential patronage but soon able to demonstrate a credible independence.
By way of posthumous tribute, Mochamad Pasha, on behalf of CSIS, has col-lected 69 of Soesastro’s newspaper and magazine articles from 1974 until shortly before his death, in May 2010. Those in Indonesian were written mainly for
Tempo, Kompas and Suara Karya; those in English primarily for the Jakarta Post. Demonstrating the breadth of Soesastro’s concerns, and including a foreword by Minister Mari Pangestu, the book is divided chronologically into ive sections: development economics; energy, technology and environment; international trade and regionalism; macroeconomics and inance; and political economy and governance.
How is such an ‘anthology’ to be read?
In the irst instance, for those who knew him, the collection tells us much about Soesastro himself and allows us to trace the evolution of his thinking during what were fast-changing times. His moral compass oriented itself by the need for social justice, hence his strategy of economic growth to alleviate poverty. As an Indo-nesian, he was a nationalist, seeking the best for his country, but he was also an internationalist, seeking a way for Indonesia to take its place within a community of nations.
Second, and heuristically, this anthology, like collections of Paul Krugman or Paul Stiglitz, is a model of how a brilliant economist can engage as a public intel-lectual with a lay audience, neither alienating with jargon and igures, nor con -descending. Soesastro makes the problem and its solution a shared concern. He wrote as he spoke – calmly and quietly, as a friend, telling the story, making the argument and enlivening it with lashes of humour. Whether in Indonesian or in English, his sentences low easily, are nicely balanced and hold the reader’s atten -tion throughout. This is not a skill taught in undergraduate or graduate schools
120 Book reviews
– indeed, writing for a lay audience is almost frowned upon in Western academic circles – and good models are quite rare, not least in Indonesia.
Third, there are the topics themselves. Soesastro was a policy economist – a rather unfashionable kind in theory-driven Western schools. Having taken a irst degree in aeronautics, in Germany, he had an engineer’s instinct for a problem, a wonderful ability to focus on the pertinent facts, and the creative lair to devise a strategy to deal with it.
Because the problems of the day come and go, the book’s sections on devel-opment and macroeconomics are now of little more than historical interest, but other material remains relevant. To my mind, two strands of the anthology, in particular, still deserve to be read.
One of those topics is fuel pricing and subsidies. Soesastro was the irst econo -mist in Indonesia to foresee the enormous problem that fuel subsidies would cre-ate. Writing in Tempo in October 1979, he neatly equated fuel subsidies with a
prison from which the inmates did not wish to escape, an analogy that remains just as valid today. The great difference is that whereas in 1979 the domestic price was set by local costs of production and the international price was a notional par-ity, now domestic production no longer sufices and the international price is the actual price. Fuel subsidies have been a catastrophic failure of policy; they have turned Indonesia into a net oil importer; distorted fuel use and capital investment; transferred huge subsidies to the urban middle class; and caused the budget to haemorrhage, crowding out other essential spending on education, health and infrastructure. On balance, fuel subsidies have been not pro-poor but anti-poor. Soesastro’s sensible plea to allow domestic fuel prices to adjust incrementally, without massive shocks, has yet to be heeded. His concern with energy led natu-rally to increasing concern with the environment and the need for international cooperation to tackle climate change.
The other big topic is regional economic integration. Despite growing up in the Sukarnoist era of revolutionary nationalist fervour, Soesastro took the oppor-tunity in the late 1960s to study in Germany, which gave him a clear perspective on the damage done by Sukarno’s adventurist isolationism. He would also have observed closer economic integration within what was then the European Com-mon Market. In the early 1970s, after his return to Indonesia, Soesastro saw a pathway for constructive engagement by broadening ASEAN into a forum for regional economic cooperation; he was inluential in bringing this to pass in due course as the ASEAN Free Trade Area. By the 1980s, Soesastro looked to the Gen -eral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and to trade negotiations to reduce tariff barriers for Indonesia’s infant manufacturing industries. By the 1990s, he was a pioneering supporter of the new initiative for an Asia-Paciic Economic Coop -eration forum, seeing the limitations of Malaysian prime minister Mahathir’s push for an East Asian Economic Group that would exclude North America and Australia.
The articles in this substantial section on international trade and regionalism show the evolution of Soesastro’s thinking, and how he honed his arguments to persuade reluctant colleagues and informed readers that Indonesia as a trad-ing nation would beneit more from open regionalism than from exclusive East Asian groupings. His inal article, ‘Challenges of shaping a regional architecture’ (Jakarta Post, 16–17/4/2010), addresses this theme in two parts, explaining the
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complexities with admirable clarity. Soesastro was probably mindful that it would be his last statement, and it shows his keen appreciation of what each forum could contribute: ASEAN Plus Three as ‘the anchor for regional cooperation and com-munity building’; the East Asia Summit as a leaders’ ‘dialogue forum’; ASEAN to drive regional cooperation; and APEC to promote trans-Paciic relations and ensure the continued engagement of the US.
What these pieces only hint at is Soesastro’s quiet but very effective diplomacy behind the scenes, within both the Indonesian government (as a lobbyist and adviser) and international forums. As a consummate insider, Soesastro knew very well that behind the different names of these forums and their various rules was a fairly similar group of players. His skill was to know with whom he could best engage to build a consensus and how each forum would best advance the grand agenda, what Americans refer to as ‘log-rolling’. By the time of his death, Soesas-tro knew that it was all a work in progress, but also that much progress had been made – Indonesia was no longer a ‘basket case’ but an inluential G20 nation – and that, barring catastrophe, the global and regional architecture would continue to evolve and, as in Europe, constrain the worst excesses of domestic nationalism and populism. It is to be hoped that one day Soesastro will ind a worthy biogra -pher and something of the inside story can be told. In the meantime, this anthol-ogy serves to remind us of a subtle mind, a true friend and colleague, a modest but very effective international diplomat, and a great Indonesian.
Howard Dick
University of Melbourne and University of Newcastle (NSW)
© 2013 Howard Dick
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.772944
Anne Booth, Chris Manning and Thee Kian Wie (eds) (2012) Land, Livelihood, the
Economy and the Environment in Indonesia: Essays in Honour of Joan Hardjono, Yayasan Obor Indonesia, Jakarta, pp. ix + 314. Paper: Rp 90,000.
While this book is a festschrift to Joan Hardjono, who has been an avid and sharp observer of Indonesia’s development since the 1970s, it is also accessible to gen -eral readers. Many chapters, in addition to Booth and Thee’s introduction, draw links to Hardjono’s works. Tjondronegoro’s chapter 2, for instance, extends one of Hardjono’s pet topics, rural institutions, to Indonesia’s progress towards mod-ernisation and democratisation.
Chapter 3, by Resosudarmo, Nawir, Resosudarmo and Subiman, focuses on the dynamics of forest land use in Indonesia. The authors acknowledge Hardjono’s position that such use must balance environmental conservation and economic development objectives. Of particular note is the chapter’s historical account of how national forest policies have led to rapid deforestation, as well as its discus-sion of decentralisation and the United Nations’ REDD+ program.
Booth, in chapter 4, says that Hardjono has been rather sceptical of macro data on agricultural output. So she lays out 12 questions on Indonesian agriculture, on topics such as output growth, environmental consequences (readers might
