RI must adopt global values: Seda

RI must adopt global values: Seda

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia must adopt global values to
participate in the globalized economy, former finance minister
Frans Seda said yesterday.

Seda said in order to participate in the global economic
community, the country must be able to conform to a new set of
rules adopted in respect to the global trend.

"This would mean possible foreign interference in the
country's internal affairs in order to abide by global values,"
he said in a seminar on globalization and nationalism.

The entity and identity of a country would remain intact in a
globalized economy, but it would have to adjust to the rules of
the game.

The values would include "global consciousness", namely
environmental and human rights awareness, social welfare
improvement, democratization and an interconnected market
economy, he said.

He said globalization would also force the government to be
more open to the public, because of the vast and rapid
distribution of information.

Economist Djisman Simanjuntak said in yesterday's seminar that
Indonesia was not ready for economic globalization, as it did not
have the qualities to participate in the global economic
community.

Djisman, the executive director of Prasetya Mulya Graduate
School of Management, said the current condition of the country
indicated its unreadiness to join the globalized economy in the
next century.

"In the global economic community, there are a small group of
leaders and a large group of followers, and Indonesia belongs to
the latter," Djisman said.

He said members of the follower group must be able to
"creatively imitate", which was a serious challenge for
Indonesia.

He cited Japan and South Korea as countries which had
successfully adopted the creative imitation culture.

"Japan is very small and has very few natural resources, but
it has managed to become one of the world's top economies," he
said, adding that Japan managed to convince the world to buy its
products because they were very competitive.

Djisman said the culture to imitate creatively barely existed
in Indonesia because of the country's dependence on capital and
physical factors, such as cheap labor and natural resources,
rather than on sustainable or groundbreaking innovations as an
agent for development.

"Even if we do imitate, we do it on the surface only, instead
of being substantive," he said.

Djisman said problems were rooted in the low education of the
country's human resources.

He said market distortions and an incentive system, which
mostly helped big businesses, also inhibited creative imitating
efforts.

"Market distortion in some labor-intensive businesses make
knowledge-intensive businesses unattractive and are often avoided
by investors," he said.

"But this does not mean that we cannot work hard to prepare
ourselves between now and then," he said. (das)