In Indonesia, the provincial, city, and regency governments typically rely on the central government for financial support. A shift toward the collection of their own tax revenues would strengthen local governments’ autonomy and encourage accountability to their communities. During 2015–2020, the Tax Revenue Administration Modernization and Policy Improvement in Local Governments (TRAMPIL) project, supported by the Asian Development Bank, provided technical assistance to help Indonesia’s subnational governments collect more locally sourced tax revenues. This report describes the challenges and achievements of TRAMPIL project activities. It presents TRAMPIL’s policy recommendations in the context of Indonesia’s economic and legal parameters on regional autonomy.

Building on previous FAD work in the tax administration field, this paper defines broad criteria for diagnosing the problems in a country’s tax administration and formulating an appropriate reform strategy. To be effective, this strategy should be based on the size of the tax gap and the country’s particular circumstances. This paper discusses some guiding principles which have provided the basis for successful reforms, including: reducing the tax system’s complexity, encouraging taxpayers’ voluntary compliance, differentiating the treatment of taxpayers by their revenue potential, and ensuring the reform’s effective management. Also discussed are specific bottlenecks that hinder the effectiveness of the tax administration’s operations.

Tax administration improvements have contributed significantly to a doubling of China’s tax-to-GDP ratio and the substantial reduction in taxpayers’ compliance costs since the mid-1990s. This paper describes the key features of China’s tax administration and their evolution over the last 20 years. It also identifes emerging challenges to the tax system and areas where further tax administration improvements are needed to sustain tax revenue and reduce taxpayers’ compliance costs in the future.

This report presents the policy recommendations resulting from the National Dialogue on Water in Indonesia, which took place between June 2022 and March 2023. Getting water resources management right, underpinned with appropriate financing mechanisms, is a prerequisite for realising Indonesia’s ambitious national economic growth agenda to become one of the top five global economies by 2045. The Dialogue, therefore, centred around two priority areas: 1) financing water infrastructure and 2) non-structural measures for flood disaster risk reduction. The report explores several instruments to enhance the financing of water services in Indonesia, such as the advantages and disadvantages of uniform water tariffs, independent economic regulation, pollution charges and demand management instruments. The report recommends the utilisation of land value capture as an additional source of financing. It also explores how water information systems for disaster response, flood forecasting and early warning can reduce flood disaster risk. The National Dialogue on Water in Indonesia is part of a regional initiative with the Ministry of Environment of the Republic of Korea, the Asia Water Council and the OECD.

With both achievements and persistent challenges over the last few decades, ensuring food security remains a priority for policymakers and development efforts in Indonesia. Setting aside some backsliding resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, Indonesia’s poverty reduction journey has come a long way since the Asian financial crisis to less than 10% by 2019. Likewise, meaningful progress has been seen in daily calorie consumption and a declining stunting rate. But despite these gains, many challenges are evident. On the production side, agriculture struggles to promote productivity, community livelihood, and sustainability—a challenge made more pronounced by increased extreme weather events, climate change, and emissions . Meanwhile, on the consumption side, not everyone enjoys access to food and nutrition security equally. Modernizing agriculture is seen as a potential response to challenges in agriculture. Increased investment in agricultural mechanization and digital technologies provides a critical avenue to transform the sector into a more inclusive, efficient, and sustainable system. With the expected increase in productivity and income—including for smallholder farmers—agricultural modernization will help Indonesia’s economy structurally transform and finally shift off-farm toward higher-paying, higher-productivity sectors outside of agriculture. The challenges facing Indonesia's food security and modernization efforts in agriculture set the broad context for this book. While solutions to food insecurity are complicated and involve many stakeholders, this book focuses on optimizing the private sector’s role in improving food security. The Center for Indonesian Policy Studies (CIPS) has gathered expertise on a range of topics related to improving Indonesian agriculture and food security and the private sector’s contribution. CIPS is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan think tank advocating for practical policy reforms informed by evidence-based policy research and analysis. CIPS presents this book as part of its commitment to empowering Indonesians to lead prosperous and peaceful lives by supporting open food trade and agriculture markets to ensure food security and sustainable livelihoods. This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. Aditya Alta is the Head of Agriculture and Food Security Research at the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies, Jakarta, Indonesia. Dr. Risti Permani is a senior lecturer in agribusiness at the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, and a member of the board of directors at the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies, Jakarta, Indonesia. Dr. Maria Monica Wihardja is a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore and a member of the board of directors at the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Evaluation of the unique conditions that apply to developing nations and an examination of their impact on both the kinds of taxes that may be raised and the effective administration of tax policy.