Howard Dick

THE 2008 SHIPPING LAW: DEREGULATION OR RE-REGULATION?

Abstract The restoration of democracy since 1998 has been accompanied by a revival of economic nationalism in Indonesia. This can be seen clearly in the field of shipping and ports. In the 1980s the government deregulated the highly protected and inefficient shipping industry to facilitate a non-oil export drive. Since 1999 a rising tide of economic nationalism has seen a gradual process of re-regulation that has restored some of the old protectionist devices. This new protectionism is likely to frustrate government policies to improve logistics and facilitate trade. At the same time, there has been a mild liberalisation of state control over the ports sector. This paper addresses the key economic regulations embodied in the new Law 17/2008 on Shipping and assesses their potential impact. It highlights an ongoing confl ict in government between protectionism/rent-seeking and development.

The Historical Dimension

The history of urban settlement is as old as civilization, but reliable figures on size of population date back no further than the late nineteenth century. Even contemporary figures on urban size are bedevilled by inconsistencies in the definition of functional urban areas. Archaeology and literature give little better than orders of magnitude of the population of leading cities from their origins in the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys around 8000 BCE and in the Yellow and Yangtze Valleys from around 4000 BCE (Morris, 2010a,b). Comparative urban history is therefore a matter of looking for patterns and very long-term trends. This survey takes its starting point as the Roman and Chinese empires of around the beginning of the first millennium, thus a time period of about 2000 years.

The Politics of Corruption in Indonesia

This paper explores corruption in Indonesia using a number of measures and indexes. It discusses the role of different officials in Indonesia’s political landscape, as well as the country’s changing attitudes and policies toward corruption. Despite increasing prosecution and public embarrassment, there is little evidence that corruption in Indonesia is on the decline. The piece concludes by examining necessary reforms.

Representations of Development in 19th and 20th Century indonesia: A Transport History Perspective

Contemporary debate in Indonesia over ‘peoples economy’ and ‘globalisation’ recalls the vigorous 1950s debate over ‘dualism’. Taking as a case study the rise and eclipse of railways, this paper argues that the colonial phenomenon of dualism can with hindsight be reinterpreted as a phase in a previous cycle of globalisation. However, economic history has overlooked the remarkable vitality of the small-scale transport sector. Focus on the small-scale sector highlights the inadequacies of familiar paradigms and suggests the need to reconceptualise long-term socioeconomic change. This analysis has important implications for responses to the current wave of globalisation and how they may be manifest in a more democratic post-Soeharto Indonesia.

Negotiating Better Governance: Jurisdictional Arbitrage Within ASEAN

The notion that business people should serve the national interests of their country of origin is widely held but also ahistorical, nowhere more so than in Southeast Asia. From the myriad ports of the archipelago, traders have always done business with the wider world and mingled with ‘foreigners’ from more far-flung places with other languages and religions. The internationalism of commerce was epitomized in the great entrepot of Malacca, whose role eventually passed to Singapore. The European powers seized territories that they consolidated into colonies: in due course these became nation-states in their own right with inherited colonial systems of law and administration and fairly arbitrary peoples and borders. These new nations were not foundational but overlays, albeit intrusive and disruptive. Quite apart from the natural rejection of colonial rule, the timing of independence in the 1940s and 1950s following upon the 1930s world depression and then Japanese occupation, meant that the new nations of Southeast Asia began with a defensive posture towards the world economy. The domestic market had to be protected against ‘foreign’ imports, exports were begrudged as a loss of resources, and foreign investment was a mode of neocolonialism. Even business itself was often seen as a morally dubious activity. All these views are now widely rejected as not just silly but actually harmful to economic prosperity. Nevertheless, the view that companies should remain loyal to their original national jurisdiction still holds popular sway. The ASEAN single market is a decisive step away from such navel-gazing but there is still residual prejudice that international business, even regional business, should be regarded with suspicion.

Appropriate Economic Space for Transnational Infrastructural Projects: Gateways, Multimodal Corridors, and Special Economic Zones

This study addresses three questions that arise in Asia when formulating, financing, implementing, and maintaining transnational linkages versus purely domestic connections. Firstly, how is optimal economic space to be defined as a useful starting point? Secondly, how can relevant criteria be developed to define the emerging spatial economy and identify efficient transnational transport networks? Thirdly, what are the main investment opportunities in physical infrastructure that would result in more efficient and effective regional cooperation and integration (making special reference to the potential role of cross-border special economic zones (SEZs) or their equivalents)?

River Cities: Bangkok, Rangoon and Saigon

Once known as the ‘Venice of the East’, Bangkok is the most water-based city in Southeast Asia. The flow of barges on the Chao Phraya River from the hinterland through the city and the many ferries along and across the river are the pulse that connects Bangkok back to Ayutthaya and the ‘age of commerce’ between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries (Reid 1993). Bangkok, like Ayutthaya, has become both a great trading centre and a symbolic religious, political and administrative heart of the kingdom. However, when founded in 1782 it was an enclave rather than the centre of a productive hinterland. The hinterland developed only after the Bowring Treaty of 1855 and the emergence of the rice trade was dominated, like most commerce and crafts, by the immigrant Chinese (Chapter 5). At the same time, the Bangkok-based Siamese (Thai) state aggressively extended its control over what would become the modern Thai nation. Thus the city grew into a nation and the nation was encapsulated in the city.

A Slow Ride into the Past: The Chinese Trishaw Industry in Singapore, 1942–1983

a critical omission in the remit of the bibliography, which Selth unfortunately does not address in his Introduction: the absence of Burmese language writing on Myanmar. Despite strict censorship until recent reforms, there has been a vibrant book publishing industry in Myanmar, with numerous monographs produced in each of Selth’s categories, with the exception perhaps of “human rights”. Burmese language writing on Myanmar contains a wealth of knowledge that has too long been neglected in the West. Despite this, Selth does include English language texts published in Myanmar by Burmese writers. Overall, the bibliography provides a thorough treatment of Myanmar-related literature in English between 1988 and the time of press in 2012. This will no doubt be an indispensable resource for scholars working in the field.

Economic space for transnational infrastructure: gateways, multimodal corridors and special economic zones

This book addresses the prospects and challenges concerning both soft and hard infrastructure development in Asia and provides a framework for achieving Asian connectivity through regional infrastructure cooperation towards a seamless Asia.

Processes: the Diffusion of Technology

‘Globalization’ has become part of modern discourse but still admits no precise definition. Like ‘Progress’ or ‘Development’, it is one of those catchall expressions that means both everything and nothing. Broadly it denotes increasing mutual interdependence in an apparently shrinking world. In fact, as historians and geographers both recognize, technological change has been shrinking the world for the past two centuries (Allen and Hamnett 1995).