Introduction: The impact of COVID-19 in Indonesia

Beginning in December 2019 the novel coronavirus swept quickly through all regions of the world. COVID-19 has wreaked social, political and economic havoc everywhere and has shown few signs of entirely abating. The recent development and approval of new vaccines against the virus, however, now provides at least some reasonable hope that we may be coming to the beginning of the end of the pandemic. This volume collects papers from a conference organised by the Australian National University’s Indonesia Project titled Economic Dimensions of COVID-19 in Indonesia: Responding to the Crisis, which was held 7–10 September 2020. It constitutes the first thorough analysis of the impact of the pandemic in Indonesia and government’s initial response to its deleterious effects. Collectively, the chapters in this volume focus for the most part on the economic and socioeconomic elements of COVID-19 in Indonesia. After the overview, the remaining chapters can be usefully organised according to three broad topics: monetary and fiscal affairs; trade, labour and poverty; and health, human capital and gender. We begin this introductory chapter by summarising the main points of each chapter. We conclude with a brief discussion of Indonesia’s path ahead.