Introduction

At the moment of independence from the Dutch in 1949, Indonesia was one of the poorest countries in Asia. By the mid-1990s it had emerged as an industrial-development success story, which might be regarded by some as surprising given that Indonesia is the most populous nation in Southeast Asia. Indonesia’s development success has been so emphatic that it now has the potential to become one of the dominant world economies by the middle of this century, if not earlier. ¹