This book, co-authored by a group of leading Australian and Indonesian scholars, provides, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of regional economic development in Indonesia. Each survey sketches the regional economy and highlight major development issues and constraints. Taken together, the surveys point to both the similarities and the differences in regional development.
Unity and Diversity is a timely contribution to the literature on Indonesian economic development in the ‘post-oil’ era. In contrast to the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when the central government was able to finance regional development on an unprecedented scale through massive inflows of aid and oil revenue, the Jakarta government now faces an era of severe fiscal austerity in which a new role must be defined for the regions, including decentralization of economic power and administrative authority, and a greater emphasis on local initiative.