Search

Starting in 2001 the Government of Indonesia employed the Regional Autonomy Law, providing larger fiscal role to the province and district governments. However, our understanding of its impacts on development in Indonesia is still limited. This paper seeks to find the relationship between increasing local governments' capital expenditure and industrial development with focus in the non-oil and gas sector. Capital spending is thought to have moderation effect on investment, the main channel for industrialization, that should contribute to industrial growth. Our System GMM results suggest that there are positive and significant correlations between capital spending and industrial growth, presenting evidence of local governments' role. However, we fail to find significant moderation effect between local capital spending and industrial investment towards the sector's growth. This poses problem for industrialization at the local level. Decentralization progress in Indonesia has been institutionally anchored by the central government, particularly with the introduction of concurrent affairs in 2004 that allowed Jakarta to take a major developmental role in districts and provinces at the cost of lesser local governments' role. Our study proposes a new institutional model that promote better central–local collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sub-national government capital spending is important for both public service delivery and economic development. Currently, Indonesian sub-national public capital spending appears barely sufficient to cover the annual depreciation of its fixed assets. A substantial proportion of local government investment spending goes to create relatively unproductive assets, such as administrative office buildings. Sub-national governments finance their capital acquisitions out of gross operating budgets and have thus far not used, to any great extent, either borrowed funds or their significant cash reserves for such purposes. Indonesian sub-nationals need to spend more on capital than they do now and also need to focus that spending on more useful types of infrastructure. The major constraints to increasing capital spending at the sub-national level are not related to a dearth of finance, but regulatory rigidities in budget preparation and implementation and, most importantly, a lack of capacity to plan, design and implement investment projects. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]