Prof, Mungkin maksudnya, negara yang miskin sumber daya alam maka penduduknya lebih militan untuk bertahan hidup. Ini mungkin alami saja: anak orang miskin biasanya lebih banyak akalnya daripada anak orang kaya....walaupun belum tentu berlaku secara keseluruhan. Namun pendapat ini menjadi menarik karena didukung data survey, jadi secara statistik (mudah-mudahan) bisa dipertanggung jawabkan. Contoh lain: India yang termasuk kategori negara miskin SDA. Salah satu yang menonjol hanyalah tambang batubara yang produksinya habis dipakai sendiri untuk PLTU. Peredaran dan harga batubara dikontrol dengan ketat oleh negara karena dinilai strategis. Mereka sekarang juga harus impor (termasuk dari Indonesia) karena sudah defisit batubara akibat kebutuhan listrik yang melonjak sejalan dengan lajunya industri dan naiknya GDP. Populasi India sekarang sekitar 1.2 milyar. India dengan cerdiknya masuk ke celah-celah bisnis dengan memanfaatkan SDM yang luar biasa melimpah. Setiap tahun ada ratusan ribu engineer yang lulus dari ratusan PT di sana (walaupun kondisi kampusnya sangat payah dan kumuh, tapi saya terkesima dengan banyaknya publikasi dan paten yang mereka punyai). Dengan didukung juga oleh warisan "jiwa" dagang dan wiraswasta, maka industri mereka juga sudah melahirkan banyak perusahaan kelas dunia: Unisys, WinPro, Tata, Great Eastern dll. Bangaluru (nama baru Bangalore) merupakan salah satu andalan industri jasa/service mereka. Di sana "berkantor" banyak perusahaan Amerika/Eropa yang dikelola oleh para perusahaan jasa konsultan tsb di atas. Kampus (kantor) Unysis di Bangalore berpegawai sekitar 14,000 (dari total sekitar 130 ribu pegawainya di seluruh dunia). Beberapa perusahaan minyak besar termasuk yang "berkantor" di sana..... Memang ada jug ayang meragukan apakah model industri jasa akan cocok untuk negara dengan populasi besar seperti India itu. China lebih memilih industri manufaktur yang dirasa lebih cocok. Apapun juga, mereka lebih jeli dalam mencuri kesempatan dalam kesempitan, mereka lebih jeli dalam ngalap berkahnya bisnis SDA termasuk minyak dan gas... salam,
From: "R.P.Koesoemadinata" <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 07:14:07 +0700 To: <[email protected]> ReplyTo: <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [iagi-net-l] No resource, become resourceful Ini benar kalau kita menganut 'free market economy". Natural resources tidak perlu dipunyai, yang perlu dipunyai adalah duit. Punya natural resources tapi tidak punya duit untuk mengexploitasinya percuma saja, akhirnya di exploitasi oleh orang lain yang punya duit. Negara yang tidak punya natural resources, tetapi punya banyak duit seperti jangan jauh-jauh Singapore saja, banyak keuntungannya, BBM dan gas dapat beli dengan harga pasaran international, sama dengan negara penghasil BBM (kalau tidak disubsidi, dan subisidi itu haram dalam free market economoy), tidak ada kerusakan lingkungan, bebas dari masalah2 lingkungan, pembebasan lahan, demo dsb. Jadi yang penting dalam free market economy adalah punya duit yang banyak, tidak perlu punya natural resources. Natural resources di seluruh dunia dapat dibeli tanpa harus menanggung dampaknya. Tentu lain kalau ini dalam economi kerakyatan, di mana rakyat harus langsung menikmati natural resources itu dengan harga explorasi produksinya, tanpa mempersoalkan "lost opportunity" mendapatkan keuntungan dengan menjualnya ke luar negeri. RPK ----- Original Message ----- From: o - musakti To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, March 12, 2012 2:17 AM Subject: [iagi-net-l] No resource, become resourceful Artikel menarik mengenai korelasi terbalik dari natural resources dan tingkat pendidikan suatu negara..... Skills not drill for survival Illustration: michaelmucci.com Every so often someone asks me: ''What's your favourite country, other than your own?'' I've always had the same answer: Taiwan. ''Taiwan? Why Taiwan?'' people ask. Very simple: because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources - it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction - yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence. Advertisement: Story continues below I always tell my friends in Taiwan: ''You're the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas - and because of that you developed the habits and culture of honing your people's skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did you get so lucky?'' That, at least, was my gut instinct. But now we have proof. A team from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has just come out with a fascinating little study mapping the correlation between performance on the program for international student assessment (PISA) examination - which tests the maths, science and reading comprehension skills of 15-year-olds in 65 countries, every two years - and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of gross domestic product for each participating country. In short, how well do your high school children do compared with how much oil you pump or how many diamonds you dig? The results indicated ''a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population,'' says Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. ''This is a global pattern that holds across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.'' Oil and PISA don't mix. As the Bible notes, Schleicher says, ''Moses arduously led the Jews for 40 years through the desert, just to bring them to the only country in the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have gotten it right, after all. Today, Israel has one of the most innovative economies, and its population enjoys a standard of living most of the oil-rich countries in the region are not able to offer.'' So hold the oil, and pass the books. In the latest PISA results, students in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having high PISA scores and few natural resources, while Qatar and Kazakhstan stand out as having the highest oil rents and the lowest PISA scores. (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran and Syria stood out in the same way in a similar 2007 test, while, interestingly, students from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, Middle East states with few natural resources, scored better.) Also lagging in recent PISA scores, though, were students in many of the resource-rich countries of Latin America, like Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Africa was not tested. Canada, Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources, still score well on PISA, in large part, argues Schleicher, because all three countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these resource rents, and not just consuming them. Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don't count its oil reserves or goldmines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students. Economists have long known about the ''Dutch disease'', which happens when a country becomes so dependent on exporting natural resources that its currency soars in value and, as a result, its domestic manufacturing gets crushed as cheap imports flood in and exports become too expensive. What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills. By contrast, says Schleicher, ''in countries with little in the way of natural resources - Finland, Singapore or Japan - education has strong outcomes and a high status … Every parent and child in these countries knows that skills will decide the life chances of the child and nothing else is going to rescue them, so they build a whole culture and education system around it''. Or as my Indian-American friend K.R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, likes to say: ''When you don't have resources, you become resourceful.'' That's why the foreign countries with the most companies listed on the Nasdaq are Israel, China/Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Singapore - none of which can live off natural resources. But there is an important message for the industrialised world in this study, too. In these difficult economic times, it is tempting to buttress our own standards of living today by incurring even greater financial liabilities for the future. To be sure, there is a role for stimulus in a prolonged recession but ''the only sustainable way is to grow our way out by giving more people the knowledge and skills to compete, collaborate and connect in a way that drives our countries forward'', Schleicher argues. In sum, he says, ''knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.'' Sure, it's great to have oil, gas and diamonds; they can buy jobs. But they'll weaken your society in the long run unless they're used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning. This article was first published in The New York Times. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/skills-not-drills-for-survival-20120311-1us9o.html#ixzz1opyxi3ig
