JAKARTA: Bank Indonesia (BI) has predicted that Indonesia’s economy will show moderate growth of 4.9 percent throughout 2015, and that the domestic economy will show stronger growth in the second semester than the first, in which growth tended to slow down.
“Indonesia’s economic growth is predicted to stay within a range of between 4.7 and 5.1 percent or at around 4.9 percent,” BI governor Agus Martowardojo said on Thursday in Jakarta as quoted by Antara.
He said the government was facing great global economic challenges in which the world’s economic growth was predicted to stand at 3.3 percent in 2015, lower than the realized growth in the previous year of 3.4 percent. This showed that the world’s economic development had not yet been too promising, he added.
“Although there have been some improvements in developed countries, such as the US, we must pay close attention to China. After growing more than 10 percent over the last 20 years, China’s economic growth declined to 7.4 percent and in 2015, it is projected to grow by only 6.8 percent. China is a big economy. If its economy slows down, we will be affected,” said Agus.
The governor further explained that a number of developing countries once touted as the most-rapidly growing economies, such as India, Brazil, South Africa and Turkey, had also been affected by the global economic slowdown and sentiments from the US Federal Reserve’s (Fed) fund-rate hike plans.
Agus said BI would always respond to current global developments with prudent and consistent policies to ensure the country’s inflation rate remained in control.
“We have also continued to push businesspeople to adopt prudent principles with minimum hedging and minimum liquidity management. As our main principle, we will continue to coordinate with the government,” said Agus.
