The Institution of Macroeconomic Measurement in Indonesia Before the 1980s

Macro-economic measurement goes back to the 17th century and became common practice in Western countries since the late-19th century. Since then, the growth and composition of some of the largest economies in Asia, particularly India and Japan, was also probed. And since the 1940s government agencies in many Asian countries were given responsibility for the development and implementation of consistent national accounting practices to assist in the planning of economic development. While this was in principle also the case in Indonesia in the 1950s, it took into the 1970s before consistent processes of macroeconomic measurement were put in place that facilitated the analysis of long-term economic growth. This paper asks why there was a delay. It finds that institutional discontinuities and limited resources prevented the establishment of consistent and well defined national accounting practices until the late-1970s.