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The Baribis Fault is an important active fault in West Java, Indonesia. This fault has recently attracted the attention of many parties since some fault segments pass through densely populated areas, raising the risk of shallow earthquakes. The long-offset resistivity tomography method was applied to image the active Baribis Faults. This method clearly showed the subsurface geometry, including the contact characteristics of the Baribis Fault near the subsurface. The long-offset resistivity tomography surveys were acquired using multi-electrodes and multi-nodes, and the data acquisition was wirelessly controlled via a WiFi connection. The pole–dipole resistivity tomography image shows a 35^∘ dip overhang structure of the Baribis thrust fault near the Jatigede area in Middle Eastern West Java, with a strike fault segment in a relative East–West direction. However, the other long-offset tomography images in northeastern West Java, near the Conggeang–Sumedang area, show the oblique thrust fault phenomena of the Baribis Fault with a strike in the Northeast–Southwest direction. The stress caused by the Cimandiri–Lembang regional strike–slip fault likely influences the dynamics of the Baribis Fault in the close area of Sumedang.

This paper studies the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on Indonesia’s labor market, using the exogenous timing of the pandemic in a seasonal difference-in-differences framework. We use multiple rounds of Indonesia’s National Labor Force Survey to establish a pre-pandemic employment trend and attribute any difference from this trend to the estimated effect of the pandemic on employment outcomes. We find mixed impacts of the pandemic on Indonesia’s labor market. While the pandemic has reduced the gender gap in employment participation due to the “added worker effect” among women, it has also lowered overall employment quality among both women and men. The increase in female employment was mainly driven by women in rural areas without a high school education entering either informal agricultural employment or unpaid family work. For men, the pandemic had negative employment impacts for all subgroups. Among the employed, both women and men work fewer hours and earn lower wages.

The role of social capital in economic development has been a subject of interest to both academics and practitioners of development for several decades. However, empirical evidence on social capital in the context of developing countries is still relatively scant. This study explores the effects of social capital on economic development in Indonesia, a large and multi-ethnic developing country. Using district-level data for 2006–2019, we find that the relationships between social capital and economic development are complex. There are both favorable and unfavorable effects of social capital on economic development, as well as nonlinear effects. Hence, we cannot draw unequivocal conclusions on the benefits or disadvantages of social capital for economic development. Nevertheless, this study finds that trust among people across different ethnic groups, participation in communal works and social activities, and trust in government are the most important forms of social capital needed to improve people’s welfare.

This study investigates the impact of green open spaces in reducing the probability of flooding and open waste burning in urban areas in Indonesia’s three largest metropolitan cities: Surabaya, Jakarta, and Medan. This study employs urban village microdata from the 2014 and 2018 Village Potential Census. First, we construct the dataset into a difference-in-differences setup. The urban villages that initially did not have any green open spaces in 2014 and then had them in 2018 were assigned as the treatment group, and those without any green open spaces in both periods were the comparison group. Then, we estimated the impact of urban green spaces on the probability of flooding and open waste burning. The results indicate that the likelihood of flooding and open waste burning had decreased in treated areas by 2018.

Urban growth, in many Asian cities, may lead to increased exposure to flood and growing sensitivity mainly because of the presence of informal settlements. On the other hand, urban areas may offer better access to public facilities, improving adaptive capacity and enhancing the local government’s capabilities. This study aims to investigate to what extent urban growth exacerbates flood vulnerability in Central Java. Concurrently, floods are the most frequent disaster in the area. The approach used in the vulnerability assessment involves socioeconomic conditions (population density, the number of impoverished families, public facilities) associated with three main aspects (exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity), resulting in the Exposure and Sensitivity Index and the Adaptive Capacity Index. Scoring and weighting analysis using secondary data in a sub-district unit from the Central Bureau of Statistics are applied. The result shows that urban growth contributes to the escalation of hazards and vulnerability. On the other hand, a high population also increases the number of public facilities and affects adaptive capacity in certain areas. Indeed, strategic urban development policies are critical to manage the three elements that form the flood vulnerability.

In implementing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), there remains a huge perception gap between China and Indonesia. Differences in ideology, politics, race, religion, and ethnicity are hindering the great potential of the BRI from being fully realized. To bridge the gap and enhance mutual understanding, people-to-people exchange between both countries should be accorded greater significance. In addition, strengthening bilateral cooperation in education, labor, tourism, and culture can bring positive spill-over effects beyond basic intercultural learning. Such non-infrastructure cooperation creates more room for people-to-people bonds to flourish, where economic interests are not blindly pursued. Deepened mutual understanding will, in turn, help achieve the major goals of the BRI and promote the building of a community of shared future along the route.

Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election was the latest testament to the popularity of Joko Widodo and his economy-focused domestic agenda. With a stronger popular mandate and a team of rivals standing united behind him, President Jokowi is now in a better position than five years ago to push his reform and revival plans focusing on infrastructure upgrading, human capital development, poverty reduction, and deregulation. Jokowi’s re-election also augurs well for China-Indonesia relations in general and bilateral BRI cooperation in particular, as he will continue to welcome more foreign investment in mega-projects to bring about an infrastructural facelift for Indonesia. A pragmatic Jokowi will not allow long-running thorny issues like territorial disputes, anti-Chinese discrimination and xenophobia to stand in the way of addressing more immediate domestic priorities, such as maintaining high growth rates, pushing for pro-business regulatory reforms, and promoting higher levels of industrialization. The three years from 2020 to 2022 will be the most crucial period for vigorously advancing BRI cooperation between Beijing and Jakarta because in the lead-up to the 2024 general election, President Jokowi will increasingly find himself a “lame duck” president as factions in his governing coalition begin to splinter to jostle for advantageous positions. He will also be more likely to face growing resistance, backlash, and scrutiny with regard to some of his China-related policies.

This paper looks into the case of Southeast Asian states’ policy of hedging toward the U.S.-China competition. It examines Indonesian and Vietnamese similar approach to their respective relations with China and the United States in a shifting regional landscape, despite the fact that the two Southeast states have different ideologies and political systems. The authors argue that the fear of abandonment and entrapment drives the Southeast Asian states’ policy preferences to ensure that the United States and China accommodate their interests. Historical baggage, especially the negative historical experiences of both countries with the United States and China, also inhibits the formation of military alliances with the superpowers. This paper compares the two influential Southeast Asian countries in detail and avoids “regional generalizations” about the countries in the region.

Indonesia has been actively seeking to improve its status and has gradually developed a trinity of national–regional–world status, consisting of independent status, regional leadership status and middle power status. In the context of China–US strategic competition, Indonesia is more sensitive to the consolidation and pursuit of its status. In response, Indonesia not only inherits the traditional diplomatic policy of “rowing between two rocks” and refuses to take sides between China and the US, but also tries to lead the ASEAN countries to develop a “third way” in the Indo-Pacific region. This paper analyzes Indonesia’s perception of and response to China–US strategic competition from the perspective of status politics, arguing that status politics plays a key role as the underlying logic of Indonesia’s “free and active” diplomacy — maintaining close relations with both China and the United States at the material level can enhance Indonesia’s economic and military status, and maintaining autonomy at the social level can gain international recognition of its status.

Indonesia has introduced a moratorium on the conversion of natural forests to land used for palm oil production. Using a dynamic, bottom-up, interregional computable general equilibrium model of the Indonesian economy, we assess several scenarios of the moratorium and discuss its impacts on the domestic economy as well as on regional economies within Indonesia. We find the moratorium reduces Indonesian economic growth and other macroeconomic indicators, but international transfers can more than compensate the welfare losses. The impacts also vary across regions. Sumatra, which is highly dependent on palm oil and is home to forests that no longer have a high carbon stock, receives fewer transfers and suffers the greatest economic loss. Kalimantan, which is relatively less dependent on palm oil and has forests with a relatively high carbon stock, receives more transfers and gets greater benefit. This implies that additional policy measures anticipating the unbalanced impacts of the moratorium are required if the trade-off between conservation and reducing interregional economic disparity is to be reconciled.

Indonesia has achieved moderately fast economic growth for most of the past 50 years. Has this growth translated into rising living standards? This is the question that is addressed in this paper. The conclusion is a qualified yes. The caveat is attached for two reasons: (i) philosophically, the definition of living standards remains a subject of considerable conjecture, and (ii) not all social indicators point in the same direction. I focus primarily on trends in measurable indicators of human welfare, particularly poverty and inequality. Combined with major improvements in the coverage and quality of the country's statistics, and a now extensive literature, it is possible to document, and in some cases explain, trends in living standards in some detail. I also investigate whether (and how) the sudden swing during 1999–2001 from an authoritarian and centralized regime to a democratic and decentralized era impacted significantly on these trends.