Former World Bank official and the country’s finance minister until 2010, Sri Mulyani Indrawati was welcomed with excitement when she was appointed once again as finance minister of Indonesia in July 2016 after a cabinet reshuffle. She is seen as competent, driven and pragmatic.
Soon after taking office, Ms Indrawati revised the 2016 budget mid-fiscal year. She says: “When I took the job, we looked at the budget and saw that the [government] revenue performance for the first half of the year was significantly below expectations.” At that rate, there would have been a Rp218,000bn gap ($16.3bn) by the end of the fiscal year, equal to 1.8% of Indonesia’s gross domestic product (GDP), and the budget deficit would have grown past the limit set by Indonesian law, 3% of GDP.
