Indonesia and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership

Abstrak

The establishment of RCEP is considered to take the increasing trade volume in Asia, and there is an opportunity for Indonesia to increase trade exports and creating Indonesia as the basis of production. However, Indonesian products must have high competitiveness to fulfill that expectation. This article seeks to analyze the position of Indonesia using a qualitative approach method of Dynamic Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA dynamic), and exercises three aproaches to obtain comprehensive results: the competitiveness of Indonesian exports compare to the RCEP member countries; Indonesia's export competitiveness among RCEP member states (including imports from other regions); and Indonesia's export competitiveness to the global trade. The results show that the overall competitiveness of Indonesian exports declined for the period 2001 -2012. The sharp decline mostly took place during the 2010-2012 period and the 2005-2006 period. Australia suffered the worst decline in export competitiveness. Meanwhile, China, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam were the countries to benefit the most from RCEP.