To appreciate academic writings by Indonesianists such as Hal Hill and Anne Booth from the Australian National University or Gustav Papanek from Boston University or by Indonesian academicians such as Aris Ananta, Sri Mulyani and Faisal Basri from the University of Indonesia, on the Indonesian economy, readers and particularly the Indonesian undergraduate students need some level of academic background.
This book entitled A Point of Entry into Understanding of the Indonesian Economy that you are now holding is written especially for them.
The book presents how the gross domestic products of a country, Indonesia in this case, differs from the gross national income. It, then, shows the relative contribution of economic sectors, the standardized direction of aggregate expenditures, the liquidity of the nation's economy, the role of government to facilitate the economy to move on the direction toward the ultimate goal of people's welfare how it relates to other countries. It puts special note on the importance of the quality of economic growth with respects to the quality of employment in finding the answer to the basic macroeconomic question of FOR WHOM the economic pie must go to.
The concluding remarks at the end of chapters include a note on some national concerns, particularly the urgency of policy measures to avoid the "natural resource curse" and not be carried away and mislead the nation into the "middle-income trap".
The senior author was awarded professorship by the government of Indonesia in 1989 and retired in 2002 after more than four decades of service as teaching staff at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta. The junior author is now a Vice Chairperson of the Demography Institute, the University of Indonesia, Jakarta and a teaching staff at the Faculty of Economics and Business.