23rd Lecture - Business in Southeast Asia with Gita Wirjawan

Date: Monday, 15 July 2024

Time: 14.30 - 16.00 (GMT +7)

Platform: Hybrid (In-person at IPMI Institute and online on Zoom Meeting and Youtube Livestream)

Speaker: Gita Wirjawan, Entrepreneur, Educator, Former Trade Minister of Indonesia

Moderator: Dr. Ir. Amelia Naim Indrajaya, MBA, IPMI Faculty, Head of Center for Sustainability Mindset & Social Responsibility (CSMSR), IPMI Institute

From Unipolar to Multipolar: The Decline of Multilateralism

Small countries became bigger, if not much bigger, as seen in the BRICS, the Mexicos of the world, the Turkeys of the world, the Nigerians of the world, and the Indonesians of the world. The world order became multi-polar, but there is a paradox within a multi-polar kind of world. As much as this has become multi-polar, this has become less multilateral, multilateralization was at its peak when the world would have been very much unipolar, and now “it’s going to be more difficult for us to usher a more multilateral kind of narrative.

Southeast Asia’s Structural Gaps: Why Growth Lags Behind China

Four reasons: underinvestment in education, underinvestment in infrastructure, lack of governance, and lack of competitiveness. The GDP per capita of Southeast Asia in the last 30 years has grown by only 2.7 times, compared to 10 times that the Chinese GDP per capita has behaved. The bureaucratic deadweight, the cultural propensity not to want to be entrepreneurial, and lack of money, lack of dough, lack of Benjamin Franklin, results in Southeast Asia being just simply not as competitive as the Chinese.

Trust, Talent, and Technology: The Path to Future Competitiveness

Money travels from one point to another because of trustworthiness, and countries must ensure competence, integrity, and accountability. There’s five technological disruptions: artificial intelligence, blockchain, genomics, energy storage, and robotics, about $200 trillion in the next 15 years. However, Southeast Asia risks just becoming the consumer of AI, at best an enabler of AI, unless it sends a lot more people to study, to speak good English, and articulate the narrative to the rest of the world.