The Minister of Finance (Minister of Finance) Sri Mulyani Indrawati received a visit from Harvard University, United States (US) postgraduate students at the Singapore-Indonesia Trek 2023 Activity. During the meeting, the Minister of Finance explained Indonesia’s various efforts to get out of the middle income trap country to become a high-income country through various institutional and policy reforms.
To fulfill this, the Minister of Finance said several things that needed attention were improvements in terms of human resources, bureaucratic reform, economic transformation, good fiscal policy implementation, and infrastructure development.
“No country has high income if its infrastructure is lagging behind. The challenge for us is a large country with archipelagic geography. We have to ensure connectivity not only on big islands but also small islands. So in this case talking about infrastructure is not as simple as just building toll roads. We have to talk about connectivity including ports, airports and internet networks,” said the Minister of Finance at the Office of the Ministry of Finance, Central Jakarta, Tuesday (10/01/2023).
Furthermore, the Minister of Finance also said that in the context of fiscal policy, the budget is a very important instrument, which is currently being managed heavily by the development of digital technology and social media. According to him, it is very necessary to communicate government policies well to the community to increase public trust.
“Surely any country that wants to become a high-income country must be able to build a transparent and accountable system. So that faith and trust exist, then stability exists. So this is all what I call reform which is not only designing the right policies but how to explain and present to the public, especially efficiency through the use of digital technology,” he said.
In addition, carrying out fiscal discipline and structural institutional reform is also very important, including eradicating corrupt practices, improving performance to become more transparent and accountable, even though it has to go through a very long and not easy process.
“For a country to perform better, to generate higher productivity and better growth, you have to work hard, reform your bureaucracy, improve your infrastructure, increase your human capital. That is what we are doing in the context of this year’s journey,” said the Minister of Finance.
But on the other hand, the Minister of Finance also said that Indonesia is a country that has performed relatively well in dealing with the Covid pandemic and enjoyed a commodity boom when the geopolitical situation was threatening. In addition, Indonesia is also increasing the use of renewable energy in dealing with the climate crisis.
“That’s what Indonesia does, it’s not always easy, but reform is actually one of the most important things, even during the pandemic Indonesia adopted a lot of reforms,” he said.
Meanwhile, other forms of reform that were also carried out were in the form of taxation reform, financial sector reform, and improvement of cooperation between the central government and regional governments.
“This is an ongoing reform. And once again, reforming all infrastructure, human resources, institutions, policies, democratic systems is not always easy. but we are at it and we are making pretty good progress on this.”
Source: Kom Info
