This might fill in some of the picture. I'm no expert, but I know Indonesia certainly became involved with the IMF at the end of the 1990s, following the "Asian economic crisis", whether it previously was part of IMF programs I don't know. Whether they technically have _completed_ implementation of any IMF programs I'm not so sure, but by the end of the decade the IMF had its tentacles in. See the following excerpt from Max Lane's article "Indonesia three years after the fall of Suharto" (from LINKS no. 18: May to August, 2001). They signed agreements with the IMF at the end of 2000 according to this.
Ben Courtice <http://home.connexus.net.au/~benj/>
Links website: <http://www.dsp.org.au/links/index.htm> ******* These political crises are unfolding at a time when Indonesia’s economy is teetering on the brink of an abyss. The economic collapse started in 1997 with the so-called Asian financial crisis. The Indonesian economy was devastated: the collapse of the rupiah from around 2000 to the US dollar to the current 10,000 immediately bankrupted almost all of the country’s large, mainly crony, corporations as well as virtually the whole banking system, including the central bank. Investment, both foreign and domestic, collapsed. A small revival of foreign investment in 1999 collapsed in 2000. Domestic investment in 2000 was only forty-seven per cent of that in 1999.
The Suharto dictatorship, followed by President Habibie and now Wahid, backed by all the political parties, opted for the IMF bailout “solution”: austerity, privatisation, deregulation and their consequences. Inflation exploded, the cost of basic goods increasing 224.16 per cent between 1995 and 2000. In those five years, the value of the rupiah declined by 359.19 per cent; income per capita dropped from US$1004 to US$596; new debt as a source of government revenue rose from 11.96 per cent to 35.27 per cent; budget outlays on debt repayment rose from 27 per cent to 42.05 per cent; government foreign debt reached US$67.315 billion at the end of 2000, and private debt reached US$76.7 billion, bringing the total foreign debt to more than the total GNP.
Over the last five years, the cost of education increased by more than thirty per cent, and twelve million children dropped out of school. Only forty-nine per cent of children between the ages of ten and fourteen attend school.
By 1999, informal sector workers—people with only casual and tenuous employment—reached 64.4 per cent of the total work force. Some 37.4 million, or 39.43 per cent of the work force, are unemployed. By 1998, there were 15.3 million rural poor; in 1999, there were 31.5 million. Many medical costs have increased by more than 100 per cent.
All this has happened in a country where, in the past, the economy at least seemed stable, even if unjust. This is no longer the case. Agreements signed with the IMF at the end of 2000 abandon earlier commitments that key sectors of agriculture, namely sugar and rice, would be exempt from deregulation. The most recent agreements commit to absolute free trade in rice and sugar. These agreements also end all subsidised credit for farmers.
The first planting of rice under these new conditions, which will mean farmers making a “profit” of less than 20 per cent of the official minimum wage, is just beginning, so it is unclear how things will proceed. But there are early reports of farmers abandoning their fields in some villages, of late planting and of reduced fertiliser use in others. Maybe the country will muddle through this harvest with some bailouts or other emergency measures, but the seeds of disaster and chaos are being sown in the villages.
The so-called free market—the law of the jungle—is being unleashed among the 200 million impoverished Indonesian workers, semi-proletarians, peasants and petty traders at a time of collapsing investment, currency volatility and state-imposed austerity. The result is worsening poverty and increasing uncertainty in people’s lives.
The socio-economic plight of Indonesia’s tens of millions of people is not the result of an agriculturally barren, resource poor or even cashless country. Indonesia—especially parts of the huge island of Sumatra, and even more so Java and Bali—is a fertile country with extremely high yields from its soil. Even excluding gas-rich Aceh and mineral-rich West Papua, Indonesia has gold, tin, nickel, coal and almost every other mineral, as well as oil and gas. There are hundreds of millions of dollars in mineral export royalties swishing around Jakarta. On top of this are billions more injected into the economy in the form of foreign loans. Of course, a lot of this money at some point flows out of Jakarta back to the US, Europe or Japan. In the end, more flows out than in, but at any given time, Jakarta is awash with dollars.
The plight of the masses therefore worsens in circumstances which sharpen the sense of injustice and frustration. In terms of agricultural produce, mineral wealth, consumer goods and even cash flow, there is not a sense that the country is so poor that nothing can be done about poverty. It is obvious that Indonesia is a poor, underdeveloped country, but there is no sense that it is a hopeless “basket case”.
As a result, there is a strong feeling developing that somebody must be to blame. The Indonesian masses are more and more pointing their fingers at the elite politik, which refers to the super-wealthy conglomerates as well as the politicians, generals and bureaucrats.
With such a political and economic crisis developing, it is not surprising that the PRD feels it is engaged in a race against time. These factors open the real possibility—never the certainty, of course—of a fundamental crisis in the ability of the ruling class to rule. There is an increasing possibility of a revolutionary ituation, and this fact is always in the minds of the PRD leadership.