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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
Professor Dr Saleh Afiff: An appreciation
Peter C. Timmer & Walter P. Falcon
To cite this article: Peter C. Timmer & Walter P. Falcon (2005) Professor Dr Saleh Afiff: An appreciation, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 41:3, 305-307, DOI: 10.1080/00074910500306585
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074910500306585
Published online: 18 Jan 2007.
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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2005: 305–7
ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/05/030305-3 © 2005 Indonesia Project ANU DOI: 10.1080/00074910500306585
a* Peter Timmer is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Development Studies (Emeritus),
Har-vard University, and Senior Research Fellow, Center for Global Development, Washington DC. Walter Falcon is the Helen Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy (Emeritus) and Co-Director of the Center for Environmental Science and Policy, Institute for International Studies, Stanford University.
PROFESSOR DR SALEH AFIFF: AN APPRECIATION
C. Peter Timmer
Harvard University, Cambridge MA; Center for Global Development, Washington DC
Walter P. Falcona*
Stanford University, Stanford CA
You learn a lot from working with someone for over three and a half decades, and we both worked with Saleh Afiff for much of his professional life. The news of his sudden death on 28 June 2005, at the age of 74, was stunning. Retired from full-time government service since 1998, Pak Saleh remained active and deeply involved with Indonesian economic affairs until the end. On Saturday, 25 June, he had sent an e-mail to Andrew Steer, Country Director for the World Bank office in Jakarta, about the start of large-scale investments in Aceh, the first to be started since the tsunami hit on 26 December 2004.
Afiff was a core member of the economic team that managed the economy for the New Order government of President Soeharto. He joined Bappenas (the National Planning Agency) in 1967, having just returned from completing his PhD in agricultural economics at Oregon State University, where he had been an Agricultural Development Council Fellow. He also had an MBA from the Univer-sity of California, Berkeley, and a Masters degree from the Food Research Insti-tute at Stanford. Like most of the early ‘technocrats’, he was superbly trained but had no experience in government or policy making. Their ‘initiation by fire’ came as they stopped the Sukarno-induced hyperinflation in its tracks and started the Indonesian economy on three decades of rapid economic growth that reached the poor. The episode is rightly given prominence in economic development text-books, and the transition from economic chaos to stability and then to rapid growth remained a vivid memory—and operational guide—for the entire eco-nomic team.
For most of his career, Afiff held the ‘food policy’ portfolio for the government, first as head of the agricultural bureau in Bappenas, then in progressively more responsible, and broader, positions as deputy chair and chair of Bappenas and finally as Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs from 1993 to 1998. He was also State Minister for Reform of the State Apparatus from 1983 to 1988, a posi-tion that gave him considerable insight into the obstacles facing deregulaposi-tion.
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306 C. Peter Timmer and Walter P. Falcon
This record is a clear testimony to one of Pak Saleh’s best traits: he was a contin-uous student and absolutely charged by an intellectual curiosity that lasted until his death. There are not many first-rate agricultural economists who became highly competent macro economists, but Afiff, self-taught on the job in macro and financial economics, was clearly one of the best. And he went back and forth between the two communities easily. At the Asian Agricultural Economics Asso-ciation meetings held in Bali in 1996, Afiff’s keynote speech stressed the macro-economic foundations of the structural transformation and the changing role of Indonesian agriculture in that process.
We had a close working relationship with Afiff—first via the Harvard Advi-sory Team, and later through Stanford-based research projects. These projects involved a large cohort of doctoral students doing field-based research. Their dis-sertations produced influential publications on the cassava, corn and rice economies, and an important policy analysis of poverty in Indonesia. Afiff was also the key intermediary between the government’s economic team and our long-term advisory role with Bulog, the food logistics agency.
In this working relationship, Afiff was a formidable taskmaster in two ways. First, unlike many Javanese (he always insisted he was Cirebonese and spoke the language to prove it), a ‘yes’ from Afiff actually meant ‘yes’—not ‘yes’, ‘maybe’ or ‘no’, depending on the context and body language. This refreshingly direct style made it easy to interact as professional colleagues, but it was not always easy to work for him. He had very high standards and he let you know when the text of a speech or a policy memorandum did not meet them. He was especially doubtful about the usefulness of the poverty study, but when it generated new program and policy insights, he happily inserted the key messages into the pres-ident’s budget speech to parliament.
Second, even when serving at the highest levels of government, Afiff did not suffer fools lightly. He included foreigners in this category, especially those from aid agencies who thought they knew better than Indonesians how to develop the economy, and those who failed to give due credit to the economic team for doing the best it could in difficult circumstances. In his graceful moments, he would simply find it ‘inconvenient’ to meet with a visiting delegation. On more than one occasion, he ordered them out of his office.
With this professional integrity went a deep personal integrity, which was characteristic of the early economic team. They knew and understood corruption and saw its economic origins in an underpaid and demoralised civil service that was asked to manage a host of dirigiste regulations. They recognised that a mili-tary with less than a third of its operational costs financed by the official budget would turn to other revenue sources, both legal and illegal. This understanding guided the path of economic reform which, as Afiff often stressed, needed to move more economic decision making into the hands of the private sector, with far fewer regulations left in the hands of the civil service, even when officials were better trained and paid. But for all of this understanding of corruption, for Afiff it remained an intellectual process. Neither of us knows of a single episode in which he participated.
Afiff remained very active after retiring from government service. From 2000 to 2004, he was a valuable advisor to the Food Policy Support Activity, an exter-nally funded research and advisory project. His role was twofold: as a monitor of
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the substance of the research itself, which he often found fascinating, and as a channel for putting advice in the hands of those in government who could, quietly, use it to push forward the policy debate.
While Peter Timmer was Dean of the Graduate School of International Rela-tions and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, Afiff was a visiting professor during the academic year 1999–2000. Timmer and Afiff taught a year-long course on the economic history of Indonesia, an exercise in learning on both sides. During a presentation by Timmer on the social profitability of the fertiliser subsidy in the early 1980s, Afiff noted sharply ‘that’s not how I explained it to parliament!’ We hope the lecture notes he prepared for that course are not lost, as they are the closest thing we have to a full recollection of the early years of the New Order regime by an ‘insider’.
Afiff was especially pleased to take this Indonesian story to the Shanghai con-ference, ‘Scaling Up Poverty Reduction’, organised in May 2004 by World Bank President James Wolfensohn as a high-level vehicle to showcase the Bank’s emphasis on reducing poverty. Afiff agonised over every word of his plenary address to get the message right: ‘sustainable poverty reduction requires a com-mitted government which fosters rapid economic growth that includes the poor. Nothing else will succeed in the long run.’ It was an effective summary of his life’s work.
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