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)