tugas softkill

Nama : Hijeriah

Npm   : 14213111

Kelas  : 1EA19

ARTIKEL 1

Inequality pervasive

In Nairobi, more than 60 percent of the population live in slums, some of which lie a stone’s throw away from the city’s most luxurious houses.
 
According to a report (Pulling Apart: Facts and Figures on Inequality in Kenya) by the Nairobi-based Society for International Development (SID), Kenya is the 10th most unequal country in the world in terms of wealth disparities. Of Africa’s 54 states, it is the fifth most unequal.
 
The 2004 report, using UN Development Programme figures, states that Kenya’s richest earn 56 times more than its poorest: the top 10 percent of the population controls 42 percent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 10 percent own 0.76 percent.

Inequality pervades every aspect of Kenyans’ lives, according to the report, citing enormous disparities - both in the capital and at national level - in almost every sphere of life: income; access to education, water and health; life expectancy; and prevalence of HIV/AIDS.
 
A person born in the western Nyanza Province, the bedrock of ODM support, can expect to die 16 years younger than a fellow citizen in Central Province, Kibaki’s home turf. Child immunisation rates in Nyanza are less than half those in Central.

Another impoverished region is North Eastern Province. While almost every child in Central attends primary school, only one in three does in North Eastern. More than nine out of every 10 women in North Eastern have no education at all. In Central, the proportion is less than 3 percent. In these two provinces, there is one doctor for 120,000 and 20,000 respectively.

BAHASA INGGRIS
Inequality pervades every aspect of Kenyans’ lives, according to the report, citing enormous disparities - both in the capital and at national level - in almost every sphere of life: income; access to education, water and health; life expectancy; and prevalence of HIV/AIDS.

BAHASA INDONESIA

Ketimpangan meliputi setiap aspek kehidupan Kenya ', menurut laporan itu, mengutip perbedaan yang sangat besar - baik di ibukota dan di tingkat nasional - di hampir setiap bidang kehidupan: pendapatan; akses ke pendidikan, air dan kesehatan; harapan hidup; dan prevalensi HIV / AIDS.

ARTIKEL 2

Both Myanmar and the US should change

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, is making a historical visit to Myanmar on Dec. 1-2, 2011.

 Exactly 50 years after John Foster Dulles went to Burma and just after ASEAN leaders let Myanmar chair ASEAN in 2014, Clinton’s visit should not only help Myanmar make political progress but also create momentum to change the US policy toward Myanmar.

“Every ASEAN member state supports Myanmar’s chairmanship [bid]. But please don’t misunderstand this support to mean that development in Myanmar’s [democracy] is now 100 percent perfect because it isn’t. The process is still ongoing,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said after the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Nusa Dua, Bali, last week (The Jakarta Post, 16/11). This message is important not only for Myanmar, but also the US government.

US President Barack Obama and all leaders gathering in Bali for the East Asia Summit expressed in their EAS chairman’s statement strong support for the current progress in Myanmar.

The leaders welcomed the significant positive development in Myanmar throughout 2011 and underscored the importance of maintaining strong momentum and continued progress.

Clinton’s visit, therefore, should mark strong US-ASEAN and US-Myanmar relations. In the past few months there have been a flurry of visits of US officials to Myanmar, such as US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Yun (May 2011), US Senator John McCain (June 2011), US Special Envoy Derek Mitchell (September, October and November 2011) and Michael H. Posner, assistant secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (November 2011).

However, US Congress insisted in September 2011 on extending trade sanctions against Myanmar by one more year in view of the Myanmar government’s continued human rights violations and suppression of political opposition.

This unfair decision will potentially bottleneck efforts to accelerate the new spirit of the US-ASEAN relations.

On Nov. 18, 2011 the National League for Democracy (NLD), the main opposition group, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, decided to register and rejoin the political process.

Not only should Myanmar change, it is fair to say that it is timely for the US also to shift its policy on Myanmar.

The US should lift all kinds of sanctions and economic embargo slapped on the Southeast Asian nation. ASEAN ministers last January in Lombok asked for the withdrawal of sanctions against Myanmar because the isolationist approach was proved to bring no changes to the country. Instead it aggravated the suffering of people there at grassroots levels.

The US should not play out its own agenda in Myanmar simply to satisfy members of Congress. Again this only shows to the world the US’ inconsistency, vested-interests and miscalculations.

“Relations between our two governments will be eased greatly if we see significant progress in these areas [the release of political prisoners, participation by opposition parties in the political life and on conflicts in ethnic areas]… We look forward to being able to play a more active and supportive role in the Burmese people’s aspirations for human rights and democracy … We will need to see some much more concrete steps in order to lift the sanctions,” said Posner, the assistant secretary of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, in Yangoon on Nov. 5.
Myanmar has proved its domestic consolidation and gradual political changes. But why doesn’t the US want to lift its sanctions on Myanmar?

The new US engagement policy in the Southeast Asia region must calculate a policy of fairness.

Fairness is the new spirit and supported foundation to win the hearts and minds of the Southeast Asian people. Fair treatment, as against “double standards”, is social capital for the US to utilize in its role in the region.

A superior approach, as expressed through “acting like a colonial master” to dictate its will on others will be no longer be helpful and sounds obsolete.

The US needs a smart, new foreign policy formula. It has to build smart public diplomacy to help accelerate public support in the region.

The US should be highly sensitive to the development of a wider East Asian community, and its policy should not only deal with governments but the people in the region.

People-centered, people-driven and people-oriented ASEAN sends an important message to the world that people in the region have freedom and rights to respond and interpret what is understood as fair and unfair as appropriate to them.

Yes. Myanmar still has a lot of homework to do, but if we want to make things fair enough, the US government should also change its sanction policy.

Lift the sanctions on Myanmar without delay. Retaining this policy will not only undermine the US credibility among ASEAN members, but people in the region as well.

BAHASA INGGRIS

Exactly 50 years after John Foster Dulles went to Burma and just after ASEAN leaders let Myanmar chair ASEAN in 2014, Clinton’s visit should not only help Myanmar make political progress but also create momentum to change the US policy toward Myanmar

BAHASA INDONESIA

Tepat 50 tahun setelah John Foster Dulles pergi ke Burma dan hanya setelah para pemimpin ASEAN membiarkan kursi Myanmar ASEAN pada tahun 2014, kunjungan Clinton seharusnya tidak hanya membantu Myanmar membuat kemajuan politik tetapi juga menciptakan momentum untuk mengubah kebijakan AS terhadap Myanmar

ARTIKEL 3

Indonesia should embrace an open economy

Indonesia has just experienced considerable turbulence in the financial markets during which some observers even raised concerns about another financial crisis.

As Indonesia’s currency, bond and equity markets plummeted, a number of economists believed that some policies may have contributed unwittingly to the predicament that Indonesia is currently faced with. This raises an important question for the future — what is the best way for Indonesia to embrace an open economy, yet protect its national interests?

Indonesia has opened its economy over time to the outside world. The capital account has been open for decades, allowing substantial flows of capital portfolio and boosting the development of capital markets. The trade sector has been gradually opened to imports though significant barriers remain. Foreign investors have been allowed to participate in Indonesia’s growth, resulting in a huge influx which has helped build up the country’s manufacturing sector in particular.

The country’s economic boom in the late 1980s and 1990s owed much too foreign investment by multinational companies that used Indonesia as a platform for export production as well as to serve the domestic market. Right after the 1997 economic crisis, foreign investments in the manufacturing, banks and telecommunications industry helped Indonesia to overcome that crisis.

As the economy started to perform well and the number of tourists increased, it created new opportunities for job creation. While it has not always been a good experience, the overall impact of the open economy policy has been good for Indonesia.

As we strive to a higher economic performance, leaving industrial development purely to the vagaries of the free market will not necessarily do the trick. Some state intervention is still needed to encourage the development of local industries that will create opportunities for local entrepreneurs to contribute to Indonesia’s economic growth.

Countries such as Japan, Korea and China have shown us that well-thought-out policies could enhance local industries to be more efficient, globally competitive and not perennially dependent on state subsidies. The question really is how can we structure a state intervention that is aimed at these local industries be delivered precisely?

Another great example is that Malaysia has enjoyed successful economic performance in general. In contrast, its automotive industry had a sad story where state intervention went wrong. In the early 1980s, the government chose to focus on developing an indigenous national car, Proton, and introduced a slew of tariffs and other inward-looking policies which allowed Proton to grow rapidly.

Sheltered from either domestic or foreign competition, Proton was able to edge out the other automotive manufacturers.

However, by 2011, Proton was saddled with huge loss and its cars could not maintain their share even to the local market, while it had failed to gain any traction in export markets. Proton was not able to become a globally competitive company that could survive without government protection even after a nearly 30 years of government support.

As foreign automotive manufacturers shunned Malaysia in favor of Thailand, the latter emerged as one of the major automotive manufacturing hubs in Asia. It could be said that Malaysia’s nationalistic car project was the “best thing” that ever happened for the Thailand automotive sector.

Korea and Japan, however, took a different tactic. They did offer protection against foreign competition and worked hard to build national automobile manufacturers. But Korea’s policy ensured that they have a healthy competition among them and this has forced Korean companies to improve their competitiveness, cost structure, design capability and innovation capacity, while also pressing their supporting parts manufacturers to do the same.

The result is one of the most impressive automotive sectors in the world today. The lesson is clear — competition is vital to encourage companies to constantly improve their efficiency to a point where they could eventually take on global competitors effectively.

Similarly, Indonesia needs to be careful about how to conduct policies on developing indigenous industries. In some cases, even well-intentioned policies could result in a contradictive impact as it was planned. For instance, the authorities recently reversed their rules on allowing unlimited importation quota of live cattle, abandoning the previous policy on annual import quota system to promote the development of a local industry. Subsequently, the policy has caused the price of domestic beef to escalate significantly and created inflationary pressures.

Another example is the 2009 Mining Law, which stipulated a ban on mining firms exporting unprocessed ore from 2014 and requires the firms to build local smelters or to cooperate with smelting companies to process the ore. Mining companies have observed that the lack of power and other infrastructure makes it quite difficult to develop smelters. But this policy, though expected to move in Indonesia up on the value-added ladder, has created uncertainty among investors since 2009.

The lessons from others experiences are clear. Policy should be geared toward first ensuring that the environment will help the development of globally competitive local industries. Creating the right business climate means building the right physical infrastructure so that manufacturers’ costs of transportation are lessened.

A huge focus on skills development is necessary to create a cadre of technically skilled workers who can fill such positions as production supervisors and technical foremen. More controversially, perhaps, Indonesia needs a policy where it judiciously embraces multinational companies that can create a base of competitive components suppliers out of whom bigger national companies can grow.

Once this is in place, Indonesia could pursue policies to prod the development of local companies, even employing protectionist and other policies judiciously as Korea did so successfully.

However, in prodding development through state intervention, policy makers should ensure that protectionist measures and subsidies are time-limited and they should ensure that there is still intense competition domestically so that local companies are always on their toes to keep improving themselves and remain globally competitive.

The writer is vice chairman of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin Indonesia) and president commissioner of PT Panasonic Gobel Indonesia. These are his personal views.

BAHASA INGGRIS

Sheltered from either domestic or foreign competition, Proton was able to edge out the other automotive manufacturers.

BAHASA INDONESIA

Terlindung dari kompetisi baik domestik maupun asing, Proton mampu tepi luar produsen otomotif lainnya.

ARTIKEL 4

New economic architecture with a human face

Stefan S. Handoyo, Jakarta | Opinion | Mon, May 17 2010, 8:44 AM

The devastating impact of the financial crises on the world’s most vulnerable populations over the last decade has really been a concern shared by governments and citizens from all over the world. The impact of the crisis only shows how globalized and closely interdependent our world has become.

A crisis sometimes brings with it “good things”, a blessing in disguise that is needed to help us reveal
who we actually are and what has gone wrong with what we have done so far. But most often, a crisis can also give birth to all kinds of unwanted events.

Pope Benedict XVI recently observed, “The worldwide financial crisis has, as we know, demonstrated the fragility of the present economic system and the institutions linked to it. It has also shown the error of the assumption that the market is capable of regulating itself, apart from public intervention and the support of internalized moral standards.”

Each economic crisis over the past decade has shown the downside of economic globalization. However, the dynamics of economic globalization often remain difficult to understand in part, because we are caught up in a process that is still developing, and whose outcome is still unclear.

Economic globalization in itself is neither good nor bad, but its impact will depend on decisions made by us. It must be seen as a process, not as an end.

Therefore, governing economic globalization calls for wisdom, not just empirical data on economic growth and fundamentals.

From the perspective of many developing economies, such as Indonesia, globalization must not only focus narrowly on the economic aspects of current global interconnections, which have been broadening and deepening, particularly in the areas of trade and finance.

Experience has shown that market forces, for all their efficiency, can be blind, particularly to the broader dimensions of human welfare and personal security. They also lack sensitivity to the demands of social justice and equality.

Thus, a more comprehensive concern for social issues, such as “human security and development” must also be given necessary attention through cooperation and the promotion of social justice in the process of globalization.

The ugly consequences of focusing (rather narrowly) human development on real GDP growth, personal welfare on efficiency gains and on free and open trade as well as financial flows, has given globalization a bad name.

Rather than bank upon the “genius of the and” (complementation and cooperation), it has allowed the world to be hemmed in by the “tyranny of the or”.

It is either the rich developed economies or the poor developing ones that benefit.

We should not forget that the same world that could find, within a few weeks, trillions of dollars to rescue banks and financial investment institutions, has not yet managed to find 1 percent of that amount for the needs of the hungry — starting with the US$3 billion needed to provide meals for school children who are hungry, or the $5 billion needed to support the emergency food fund of the World Food Programme.

We have also had clear reminders from financial markets in recent years, such as a crisis in the US financial system in 2008, that there is more to a market competitive system than these narrow, strictly economic values and principles.

Indeed, at the bottom of any market competitive system are money and credit, both of which are based essentially on faith and trust. But, these flourish in the final analysis only within an ethical culture, which calls for virtue, and among others, the golden mean and a system of checks and balances.

Thus, self-interest must be balanced by common interest and the invisible hand of markets by the more visible hand of a public regulatory authority.

A new globalization requires a new culture that can orient the changes.

These principles ultimately derive from universal natural law, he said. And thus, “the principles of this ethical order, inscribed in creation itself, are accessible to human reason and, as such, must be adopted as the basis for practical choices.”

On this premise, first, we need to propose a culture based on fundamental principles, such as the universal destiny of earthly goods and the common good, grounded in respect for the dignity of the people and acknowledged as the primary goal of production and trade systems, political institutions and social welfare.

It has become increasingly evident that the common good embraces responsibility to future generations. An essential aspect of globalization is, therefore, the promotion of the principle of solidarity. A global solidarity that must be recognized as a basic ethical criterion for judging any social system and will ensure all peoples can benefit from economic globalization.

Globalization, therefore, needs to be a process guided by a respect for human liberty. A globalization thus oriented by these two principles will result in a harmonious unity of the human family.

Indonesia, as the third-largest democracy in the world after India and the US, can offer a model on how to promote human liberty in a responsible manner in a modern, open and free society.

Being also a country with the largest Muslim population, it is an opportunity for Indonesia to demonstrate to the world that Islam and democracy that respects human liberty is compatible and complementary.

When we talk about Islam we cannot avoid talking about religion that carries a universal moral law needed to guide the process of globalization.

Thus, Indonesia can offer a unique solution to the many problems of globalization by actively proposing the common universal values of world religions as a foundation and source for a more human-friendly process.

It is in this context, the role of — and the compatibility of — religion and politics, faith and democracy, virtues and wealth in Indonesian society are very relevant as a model of a new global economic architecture.

The spiritual dimension is fundamental to converting the model of secular economic globalization into one that has a human face.

BAHASA INGGRIS

Economic globalization in itself is neither good nor bad, but its impact will depend on decisions made by us. It must be seen as a process, not as an end.

BAHASA INDONESIA

Globalisasi ekonomi sendiri adalah tidak baik atau buruk, tetapi dampaknya akan tergantung pada keputusan yang dibuat oleh kami. Ini harus dilihat sebagai suatu proses, bukan sebagai tujuan.