Indonesia's 2026 budget ripe with politics, thinner on strategy

FILE PHOTO: This picture taken on September 16, 2015 shows a worker handling palm oil seeds in Indonesia's Sumatra island. Prabowo Subianto said in a state budget address on Friday (Aug 15) that the government had taken control of 3.1 million hectares of illegal oil palm plantations. Neither the President nor Sri Mulyani explained how this would reshape the revenue collection, but the latter said without elaborating that it “created a new database”. - AFP

JAKARTA: A lack of satisfying answers on how to reach growth goals set forth in the freshly unveiled 2026 state budget has led economists to conclude that the fiscal document is based more on political ambition rather than on technocratic calculation.

Centre of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) executive director Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara told The Jakarta Post on Saturday (Aug 16) that the targets set in the budget plan “overshoot and require strenuous effort” to attain.