Crisis and expats

After reading the Sunday edition of The Jakarta Post I was relieved to learn that somebody has finally discovered who is responsible for recent problems in the Indonesian economy. The expatriate workers, of course. Now we know that there were 50,000 of them in December 1997 and that they cost the economy US$3 billion per annum. Now that draining of precious U.S. dollars through this channel has stopped (there are only some 15,000 of them left, mostly on rupiah salaries), we can concentrate on the obvious next steps, expensive imported equipment and machinery including aircraft, computers and others of this kind. This stuff probably costs the economy even more than expats. Why import a state of the art machine when we can work with good old steam engines. So when we put a plug on this useless spending, we can move on to... electricity. We cannot talk about cost and not mention this item. And since we already dumped the equipment, who needs it anyway. Now it's a good moment to step back a bit and lay off all local consultants, too. They do cost only seven million a month, but imagine how many Rp 300,000 jobs that will open...

Do I need to go on with this logic or have you already got my message? We need to relate production costs to profit achieved. Only this way can we say that something (or somebody) is expensive. A horse eats a lot. But having a horse is expensive only if the horse is not productively utilized. And even then don't blame the horse. Blame the owner.

To illustrate my argument, please ask Mr. Zatni Arbi why he insists on buying expensive foreign computer magazines (The Jakarta Post, Sunday, Feb. 15, page 1) when he can have much, much cheaper local ones.

To further illustrate my argument, please find one "local consultant", or anybody else, who has actually got a raise in pay or benefited in any other way from 32,000 expat layoffs.

BRANIMIR SALEVIC

Jakarta