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rfmcdonaldA recent post by John Quiggin at Crooked Timber highlighting the relative strength of democratic Indonesia in dealing with the late dictator Suharto and his many negative consequences managed to tailspin into a debate about positive consequences of his rule. Douglas Muir of Halfway Down the Danube argued that, under Suharto's tenure, Indonesia's economic and development indices--GDP per capita, life expectancy, literacy rates--did improve sharply, and more quickly than in any of Indonesia's peers. Out of curiosity, I went to the Penn World Tables to compare the relevant figure of GDP per capita in the two largest countries in the Malay world--Indonesia and the Philippines--starting from 1960 and continuing to 2003.
More, as this 2004 ranking of countries by Gini index suggests, wealth in Indonesia was more equally distributed than in the Philippines, with reported Gini index figures of 37.0 and 48.1, respectively.
A strong case can be made that the average Indonesian does lives better than the average Filipino, or at least enjoys more wealth, the timing of economic growth and decline in the two countries. The timing of growth and decline in these countries also makes a good case that Suharto's kleptocracy did a better job at economic development than Marcos' kleptocracy and many of the democratic regimes that followed it. Whether Suharto's kleptocracy was the best regime realistically available to Indonesia is a separate question entirely, although its worth noting that the problems of Indonesia's occupation regimes in Papua and East Timor could have been averted if the Netherlands and Portugal had done a better job of decolonization and not unwittingly collaborated with Indonesian nationalist expansionism.
- In the Philippines, a country integrated into the wider world through its very close post-colonial and Cold War-era links with the United States, GDP per capita as a percentage of the United States declined more or less consistently, from 15.8% in 1960 to 10.5% in 2003.
- In Indonesia, GDP per capita began at 5.4% of the United States' in 1960, stagnated at that level until the mid-1970s, and then sharply rose to reach a peak of 13% by 1997, thereafter slumping to the Filipino level.
More, as this 2004 ranking of countries by Gini index suggests, wealth in Indonesia was more equally distributed than in the Philippines, with reported Gini index figures of 37.0 and 48.1, respectively.
A strong case can be made that the average Indonesian does lives better than the average Filipino, or at least enjoys more wealth, the timing of economic growth and decline in the two countries. The timing of growth and decline in these countries also makes a good case that Suharto's kleptocracy did a better job at economic development than Marcos' kleptocracy and many of the democratic regimes that followed it. Whether Suharto's kleptocracy was the best regime realistically available to Indonesia is a separate question entirely, although its worth noting that the problems of Indonesia's occupation regimes in Papua and East Timor could have been averted if the Netherlands and Portugal had done a better job of decolonization and not unwittingly collaborated with Indonesian nationalist expansionism.
