Meanwhile Indonesia’s labor force is growing, its commodity exports are booming, and its new capital is under construction. There is a reason why Xi Jinping reportedly tried so hard to bring Indonesia into the BRICS expansion this week. He knows very well where the future is heading: it’s to China’s south, not its north.
While Russia’s workforce ages and its education levels decline, Indonesia’s continue to improve as new workers enter the labor force with strong educational backgrounds and important skills, albeit at a slower rate than the two decades prior to COVID. A growing and more prosperous labor force has also provided a strong foundation for increases in Indonesian private consumption. This is particularly important for China as it searches for new consumer markets to absorb its exports. Although Russia may be an important export market for Chinese producers for the moment, as it rushes to fill the gaps left as western companies pull out, its long-term growth prospects are stagnant at best and
more likely negative. The opposite is true for Indonesia, which is still mostly on track to achieve its goal of becoming a High-Income Country by 2045.
Indonesia can see its brighter economic future ahead and its refusal so far to join the BRICS expansion speaks to its own growing confidence—and was one of the most significant and overlooked developments of last week.
The data shows that Russia will increasingly need benefactors like China to prop up its economy while rising powers like Indonesia will have many more friends eager to do business across the islands.
www.atlanticcouncil.org
