Indonesia has a centralized statistical system, even though certain types of statistics, especially on banking, are compiled by the Central Bank. The Central Bureau of Statistics (the Indonesian acronym is BPS) is the official agency in charge of compiling practically all types of general purpose statistics. It promotes the use of statistical standards and collaborates with all Government Departments, Statistical Offices of other countries and International bodies to develop statistics. It is obvious that the government must have a wide range of statistics in order to formulate sound economic plans and programs. A workable system of national accounting is a must for this purpose. Since many years BPS work on improving its statistics gathering system. There are a number of macro-economic statistics compiled regularly by BPS which are submitted to the Cabinet Meetings, especially on economic growth (GDP), inflation rate (CPI), employment, exports and imports statistics, and other relevant economic indicators. GDP, as the main indicator on economic growth and development, is published by sector of origin and by usage (expenditure side). The BPS releases GDP figures both quarterly and annually on a regular basis. Even though there are a number of other economic indicators produced within National Accounts Statistics, such as the Flow of Funds Accounts, Social Accounting Matrix, etc., GDP is still most widely used by policy makers and economists as the principal indicator. The current GDP series are using 1993 as the base period. Economic sectors which are in need of further improvement are, among others, construction (which still uses commodity flow approach) and ownership of dwellings. Another problem is to reduce the time-lag of the quarterly GDP. Inflation rate is estimated from price data collected from all provincial capitals. Urban areas outside the capital city are excluded in order to reduce the delay in reporting. By limiting the coverage of prices collected, the time-lag can be held at a minimum and reporting of the monthly inflation figure can be accomplished by the end of the latest month. The current weighting diagram is based on 1987/1988 Family Budget Survey. On average there are 225 goods and services included in the market basket of each city. The open unemployment rate is relatively low in Indonesia, and BPS is being criticized by users because of this low figure. Using at least one hour during the last one week as the concept, the outcome is always relatively low, around 3-4 percent. This is because the informal sectors, especially in rural areas, dominate the economic activities. The problem actually is not with unemployment but underemployment. Measuring underemployment is the core problem. The monthly export-import statistics suffer from a two to three month time-lag due to the large volume of documents to be processed. Even though it is envisaged to take a small sample of export and import documents, no ideal approach has been established so far. The trade-off between timeliness and detailed information is still a major problem and requires a full study.
