Crisis and expats

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