The institutionalisation of macroeconomic measurement in Indonesia before the 1980s

Macro-economic measurement goes back to the seventeenth century and became common practice in Western countries since the late-nineteenth century. Since then, the 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 had responsibility for the development and implementation of consistent national accounting practices to assist the planning of economic development. While this was in principle also the case in Indonesia, it took into the 1970s before consistent processes of macro- economic measurement were put in place that facilitated the analysis of long-term economic growth. The paper asks why this was the case. It finds that institutional discontinuities and limited resources prevented the establishment of consistent and well-defined national accounting practices until well into the 1970s.