Asia Economy

Stretching 5120 km from the shores of Aceh to the mountains of Papua, Indonesia encompasses 17,000 islands – around 6000 of which are permanently inhabited – and comprises 34 different provinces, each with its own capital city. Within these islands, 300 distinct ethnic groups exist, speaking more than 742 languages between them. Until the turn...

As the world’s nations and businesses become increasingly interconnected, so too does the flow of global migration. According to the OECD’s “International Migration Outlook 2018”, in 2017 some 258m people resided in a country other than the one they were born in and more than 5m foreign-born persons settled in OECD countries. The flow of...

Recent decades have seen a downward convergence in corporate tax regimes as advanced, emerging and developing economies moved to grab a bigger slice of the global investment pie. Headline corporate tax rates have fallen by 20 percentage points since the early 1980s. Alongside lower average rates, special tax incentives aimed at capturing...

The Indonesian rupiah slumped for most of 2018, but with the currency enjoying a comeback against key global currencies such as the US dollar in early 2019, the authorities appear to have warded off a major threat to growth. The policy decisions of 2018, including monetary policy and import replacement, affirmed a sense of long-term economic...

The economy expanded by 5.2% in 2018, according to official figures from Statistics Indonesia, slightly above the previous year’s growth rate of 5.1%. This was driven by gains in major industries: construction grew by 6.3%, vehicle and retail trade by 5.1%, processing by 4.2% and agriculture by 3.9%. Strong performances were also seen in...