Roy Huffington, who paid back the Indonesian gift by selling the military shock batons. One of the closest chums of the Suharto family was the Riady family, who kontrol the Lippo Group, the multibillion-dollar conglomerate with investments throughout Asia. Lippo stood to lose millions should China's MFN status be revoked. Not a bad return on investment. The return was not seen by the people of Indonesia or East Timor, of course.
Economists measure growth by such standards as the gross domestic product.
It is true that recent decades saw a rapid industrialization in Indonesia. For maybe 200 families, many of whom became multi-billionaires, there also was a rapid growth in wealth. For the great majority of Indonesians, however, this has been a period of immeasurable pain. By design and by default, the agricultural foundation of Indonesia's economy has collapsed, causing millions of peasants to leave the land and to head for the cities, where they became a desperate army of the unemployed, lined up outside the sweatshop hiring gates. Fundamentally, what is wrong with Indonesia's economy is that is impoverishes hundreds of millions in order to enrich a few hundred.