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Professor Mubyarto, 1938–2005
Howard Dick & Peter Mccawley
To cite this article: Howard Dick & Peter Mccawley (2005) Professor Mubyarto, 1938–2005, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 41:2, 163-167, DOI: 10.1080/00074910500218384
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074910500218384
Published online: 18 Jan 2007.
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ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/05/020163-5 © 2005 Indonesia Project ANU DOI: 10.1080/00074910500218384
1On Pancasila and Pancasila economics, see Boediono (2005): footnote 1, in this issue.
PROFESSOR MUBYARTO, 1938–2005
Howard Dick
University of Melbourne
Peter McCawley
Asian Development Bank Institute, Tokyo
The late Professor Mubyarto became best known in Indonesia in recent years for his prolific writings about Pancasila economics1and ekonomi rakyat(people’s eco-nomics). But his numerous articles on these topics reflected his long-held views about rural development and economic priorities in Indonesia. For the whole of his adult life, Mubyarto cared passionately about living standards in rural areas, and worked unceasingly to encourage policy makers to give more attention to the interests of the wong cilik(little people) in villages across the nation.
Mubyarto was appointed as a promising junior lecturer at Gadjah Mada Uni-versity (UGM) on graduation in 1959. His interest in rural development then gained rigour from graduate study at Iowa State University, where his doctoral dissertation in agricultural economics was a study of the important policy issue of
The Elasticity of the Marketable Surplus of Rice in Indonesia(1965). In the mid-1960s he returned not just to a desperately poor Indonesia but also to the Special Region of Yogyakarta (DIY), then one of the very poorest parts of Java, in which mal-nutrition was a horrifying reality (Napitupulu 1968). His return coincided with a period of political turmoil, which did not spare his own university or family. Mubyarto wondered why rural poverty persisted. He soon became convinced that it was the social and structural aspects of rural development that needed attention, rather than what he saw as the more technical issues of agricultural economics.
In the late 1960s members of the newly established Indonesia Project at the Australian National University—Heinz Arndt, David Penny, Panglaykim, Ruth Daroesman and others—were looking to develop links with academic institu-tions in Indonesia. Around the same time, the then young Dr Mubyarto, recently returned to UGM from graduate studies in the US, was keen to encourage research on agricultural and village economics in Indonesia. Mubyarto and his UGM colleagues began to work closely with Indonesia Project staff on a range of scholarly activities, both in Indonesia and in Australia. Mubyarto became a member of the Editorial Board of the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies in 1970 and served until 2003—longer than anyone else except for Heinz Arndt and Jamie Mackie.
164 Howard Dick and Peter McCawley
Mubyarto’s wider interests were reflected in the first article he wrote for BIES
(co-authored with his close friend Ace Partadiredja) in October 1968 (Mubyarto and Partadiredja 1968). This survey of regional development challenges in the Yogyakarta region opened in characteristic Mubyarto style:
Many visit Djakarta for a few days and think they can form an impression of Indonesia. However, as with any other country, few foreigners learn much of what goes on in the country from a luxurious suite in Hotel Indonesia, or even from the brief interview with the top decision-makers who may themselves seldom see the countryside. Yet decisions formulated in Djakarta affect the villages and hamlets far away from the daily business of the central administrative machinery. While the people in Djakarta talk about the new model Fiat or about foreign policy, … the farmers in the remote villages worry about getting food for tomorrow, about shortage of water for their sawahone year and floods the next, and about the price of clothing. This is what happens in the villages in the Special Region of Jogjakarta …
The survey’s conclusion was just as uncompromising:
The most important problem of the region is the same as that of the nation as a whole, namely the problem of providing enough food for the population. … Considering all the difficulties, some of the achievements in urban and rural development over the last two years are noteworthy. Many of these have been achieved almost entirely by gotong rojong, group action by the people. The prospects for the region’s development are rather disheartening. … Only when real economic leadership is present will there be a favourable climate to mobilise all the economic resources, natural as well as human; only then may improvements be anticipated.
The main ideas about rural and national development that Mubyarto and Ace set out in this regional survey were ones to which Mubyarto frequently returned in innumerable newspaper articles and public lectures throughout the rest of his life. One theme, which he later developed into the idea of the ekonomi rakyat(see, for example, Mubyarto 2002), was the importance to the great majority of poor Indonesians of such things as agricultural development, village economy and the local informal sector.
A second, closely related theme was the mistaken and usually urban-biased views that foreign visitors and senior Indonesian policy makers hold about rural development. He believed that the foreign and urban ‘elites’, as he called them, often promoted development policies that did not meet the needs of poor people in rural areas. His concern about what he saw as the growing influence of Jakarta-oriented, well connected conglomerates was, perhaps, one of the main reasons that Mubyarto grew increasingly uncomfortable with the principles of neo-classical economics during the 1980s and 1990s. As a young PhD graduate, Mubyarto began his career believing that more market-friendly policies were needed to help promote agricultural development in Indonesia. But his experi-ence in rural areas, combined with his dismay at the social and political impact of rapid corporate and industrial growth in Indonesia during the Soeharto era, eventually led him to become sharply critical of the favours shown to conglom-erates during the New Order period. He later argued that this strategy had con-tributed substantially to the 1997–98 crisis.
A third theme was that, despite all the rhetoric from national and international officials about the importance of agricultural development, the success or failure
2‘Bimas’ (from ‘Bimbingan Massal’, mass guidance) is the name of a nationwide rice
inten-sification program that included subsidised loans. Inpres (Instruksi Presiden) refers to a program of special grants from the central government for village development.
of village development depends very much on the gotong royong(mutual self-help) efforts of local communities. Institutions such as cooperatives and local enterprises, as well as rural credit organisations, were therefore needed to sup-port village economies.
A fourth idea was the need for ‘real leadership’. In the context of the time, the point that Mubyarto was making was that there was not presently good leader-ship in Indonesia and that until good leaders emerged the prospects were poor. This was one aspect of the set of ideas that later led him to talk increasingly of the need for more social and economic justice in Indonesia and for an ekonomi Panca-silathat would deliver that justice, as promised by the founding principles of an independent Indonesia (Mubyarto 1984). Those of use who have worked with Mubyarto since the late 1960s know that all these ideas and values were deeply held convictions.
In 1969 Mubyarto was one of the key figures in establishing the Indonesian Society of Agricultural Economics (Perhimpunan Ekonomi Pertanian Indonesia, or Perhepi) (Penny 1970). In 1971 he visited the ANU in Canberra with his fam-ily for an extended period to write a textbook on applied agricultural micro-economics for publication in Indonesia. At the same time, he was working to establish a one-year graduate program in agricultural economics at UGM for staff members from other universities, with the aim of strengthening the agricultural economics profession across Indonesia. During his visit to the ANU he interacted closely with colleagues in the Indonesia Project and had sustained and robust debates with scholars such as David Penny about desirable policies for rural development in Indonesia.
During the 1970s, staff and students from the Indonesia Project visited Yogya-karta on various projects and benefited from working with Mubyarto and other colleagues in the Faculty of Economics at UGM. Both of the authors of this note worked in the faculty in 1972 and 1973, teaching in the agricultural economics program that Mubyarto was directing. He was also, at the same time, head of the faculty’s newly established Research Institute (Lembaga Penelitian).
In those early days of the New Order the salaries of university lecturers were very modest, obliging staff to supplement them in various creative ways. One of Mubyarto’s early initiatives was a private enterprise start-up, namely a stock-feed mill to meet the quickening demand for chickens. As was more usual in those days, he also supplemented his modest salary by consulting for govern-ment agencies, sometimes including visiting Australians on the faculty consult-ing teams. In these early days of the Bimas rice intensification program and the Inpres village development grants,2this research involved days at a time in fac-ulty jeeps and ultimately many thousands of kilometres criss-crossing Central Java to towns like Magelang, Boyolali, Demak, Purwodadi, Surakarta and Sragen to meet with regional officials in their local offices. Later, Indonesia Project col-leagues such as Chris Manning, Hal Hill, Jamie Mackie and Colin Brown worked with Mubyarto and other UGM researchers such as Ace Partadiredja, Boediono,
166 Howard Dick and Peter McCawley
Masri Singarimbun and Lukman Sutrisno on a range of projects throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
By the early 1980s Mubyarto had become disillusioned with what he saw as the top-down, materialistic and pro-market policies of the New Order govern-ment. The early promise of the green revolution had not been fulfilled. Mubyarto was also disappointed with the lack of support for agricultural economics in uni-versities across Indonesia. In the face of New Order authority, then near its peak, he launched a campaign for a more grassroots approach, termed ‘people’s econ-omy’ (ekonomi rakyat), that focused attention upon the ownership of wealth and the uneven distribution of the fruits of development. He thereby turned the New Order’s rhetoric of Pancasila into a political boomerang, by reminding people of its Sukarnoist origins and the original ideals of nationalism, democracy and social justice.
In the late 1970s Mubyarto had been instrumental in establishing the Institute for Village and Regional Development Studies (Pusat Penelitian Pembangunan Pedesaan dan Kawasan) at UGM. The goal of the Institute was to encourage research on issues of rural poverty in places such as the dry chalk hills of Gunung Kidul in southeast Yogyakarta. From this bastion Mubyarto launched various criticisms during the 1980s against what he saw as the excesses of the New Order government, and its lack of concern for ordinary Indonesians in rural areas. Some academic colleagues were uncomfortable with the political undertones of certain of his comments, but he was, as ever, undeterred. As it turned out, the new insti-tute was the genesis of what would later become the nationwide backward vil-lages program (Inpres Desa Tertinggal, IDT). The simple idea underpinning the IDT program was that a modest injection of public funds would be a catalyst in helping the most disadvantaged villages across Indonesia to tackle their own development challenges (Pangestu and Azis 1994: 32–7).
Mubyarto thought as an applied microeconomist in terms of household eco-nomics, rather than as a macroeconomist. Amidst the prevailing enthusiasm for New Order development, he perceived a fundamental truth that many national and international scholars and policy makers overlooked—namely, that Indo-nesia was still a very poor country and that economic development needed to be focused at the grassroots level to help the wong cilikto help themselves. He never believed in the ‘trickle down’ approach.
Like his friend and colleague Masri Singarimbun, he believed that Indonesians must set Indonesian development priorities. And, like Masri, Mubyarto wrote countless newspaper articles and magazine columns about issues of Indonesian public policy that affected the lives of farmers and the poor in rural areas. By the late 1980s Mubyarto’s sometimes controversial contribution to the public policy debate in Indonesia was officially recognised. In 1987 he was appointed a mem-ber of the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR). In 1993 he was given a senior position in the National Planning Agency (Bappenas) as an assistant minister and expert staff member with special responsibility for the IDT scheme. He worked hard to promote this program, but was frustrated by the practical difficulties of implementation in the field.
Because he was so outspoken, and perhaps partly because of institutional rivalry between the University of Indonesia in Jakarta and UGM in Yogyakarta, Mubyarto never became a minister under President Soeharto, despite his
larity. His Pancasila economics was seen by some as a UGM challenge to New Order economic policies, which he and some others saw as too liberal, at least in regard to macroeconomics.
At the end of his term as assistant minister, and with the respect that is accorded to a professor at a leading university in Indonesia, at the age of 60 Mubyarto found himself in 1998 something of an elder statesman for younger scholars. With more time to read, he delved back into the classics of economics. He was interested, for example, in the moral issues that Adam Smith set out in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, of which he much approved for its ethical content; he urged colleagues to consider the implications for an ekonomi Pancasilain Indo-nesia. He also continued to research and publish, with particular interest in the policy shift towards greater regional autonomy.
Although Mubyarto pursued a very successful academic and professional career during the New Order period, he was never really a New Order man in his basic convictions. He was too good an economist to be a Sukarnoist, but he never gave up a strong loyalty to Indonesia or an over-riding and uncompromising con-cern for the common welfare. In 1999, with democracy and reformasias the mood of the day, he could see the prospect of a more humane world. In 2002 he renewed his commitment to ekonomi Pancasila by establishing the Pusat Studi Ekonomi Pancasila (Centre for Studies of Pancasila Economics) at UGM. It may be that in a generation’s time people will look back and judge that Mubyarto was one of those who most clearly saw the flaws in the New Order and who appealed, in the long run very effectively, over the heads of the generals to the then subdued but ultimately inexorable force of public opinion.
Mubyarto was a complex person of passionate convictions, who was not reluc-tant to swim against the tide. He had firm views that were grounded not only in economics but also in his Muslim faith. He could at times be disconcertingly frank with those who disagreed with him. But all of us will treasure our conver-sations with him: the intellectual challenges that he tossed out, the quizzical intensity of his gaze in debate, and the laughter when the paradoxes of choice needed to be faced. Mubyarto struggled for a better world, but he also had the wisdom of patience in accepting what could not be changed. The wide range of people who paid such generous tribute to him after his unexpected death shows how much he was respected and the great affection in which he was held.
References
Boediono (2005), ‘Professor Mubyarto, 1938–2005’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
41 (2), in this issue.
Mubyarto (1984), ‘Social and Economic Justice’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
20 (3): 36–54.
Mubyarto (2002), ‘Ekonomi Rakyat Indonesia’,Jurnal Ekonomi Rakyat1 (1), www.ekonomi-rakyat.org/edisi_1/artikel_2.htm>.
Mubyarto and Ace Partadiredja (1968), ‘An Economic Survey of the Special Region of Jogjakarta’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies11: 29–47.
Napitupulu, B. (1968), ‘Hunger in Indonesia’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 9: 60–70.
Pangestu, Mari, and Iwan Jaya Azis (1994), ‘Survey of Recent Developments’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies30 (2): 3–47.
Penny, D.H. (1970), ‘Second National Conference on Agricultural Economics’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies6 (1): 85–6.
