Blog posts

Purchasing Power Parity and the Big Mac Index

We often see the news comparing GDP between countries. These GDPs are usually measured in constant USD or current USD. While these GDP measures are useful for comparing economic power (not the best vocab to use? Not sure what’s better tho), they are not very useful to compare standard of living. That’s because price level in one country is different than other countries. While Indonesian GDP is smaller than Australia if we measure it with current USD, Indonesian GDP is actually bigger if measured with GDP PPP.

Global Value Chain dalam bumbu gado-gado

Hari ini saya sarapan gado-gado. Menurut saya, gado-gado (dan bumbu kacang secara umum) adalah sebuah fenomena yang luar biasa. Meskipun kacang pertama kali diperkenalkan oleh Portugis yang dibawa dari Mexico, Masyarakat Indonesialah yang pertama kali membuat bumbu kacang. Bumbu kacang ini sungguh versatile karena bisa dicampur apa aja. Dikasih sayur, bisa. Kasih gorengan, enak. Nasi uduk, hayu. Buat bumbu ayam bakar, ya bisa (alias jadi sate).

The chili price mystery: low because of imports?

Chili is one of the most important commodities in Indonesia. Indonesians love chili. Even while studying abroad, I still bought sambal because chili is just that good. It’s not only vital in various Indonesian dishes but also contains very high levels of vitamin C!

Question 4 Tutorial 1 ECON3102 2021

About this post

This post is created to quickly demonstrate one of the possible answer of question 4 of tutorial 1 of ECON3102. I chose to use r’s WDI to show it but any other software and any other source of data can be used obviously. The reason why I use WDI is because it is convinient and easy to show some graph. If we use World Development Indicators we don’t even need to download it. Just use its graph function which is super convinient.

New update of the recent second wave (or third?) of COVID-19 in Indonesia

It has been a while since i last wrote about COVID-19. Today i’d like to check out Indonesia’s statistic on COVID-19, especially since it seem to get worse these days, unfortunately, and so many people talked about possibility of the government intentionally undertest to push down new cases at the cost of human lives.

Indonesian Students Association abroad: what is it for?

Twitter is currently buzzing because of this post by BEM UI (the Student Executive Board of the University of Indonesia):

Among the replies, several were interesting, essentially questioning BEM UI’s legitimacy in representing all UI students’ views. Some said BEM UI should not be used as a political tool. Others even attacked the chairperson and took issue with the fact that the BEM UI chair is a member of HMI (Islamic Students Association).