March 9, 2024

MINISTER of Finance Sri Mulyani Indrawati said the important role of Indonesian MSMEs which create 97% of jobs. This shows that the dominance of job opportunity creation by MSMEs also determines the tax base in the end.

The thing is, the majority of people work in informal MSMEs and this determines welfare. With many MSMEs penetrating digital, it is hoped that many MSME sectors that were previously informal and perhaps unstable will become more formal and more stable in income.

Indonesian MSMEs contribute up to 61% of GDP. This is relatively much higher than countries in ASEAN and certain countries in the G20 group.

The large number of MSMEs and their impact on the economy have not been able to penetrate the export market. This is because the contribution from Indonesian MSMEs is only 15% of Indonesia’s total exports.

One factor that is an obstacle is financing. He said that as many as 29.2 million MSMEs were unable to access financing, mainly because of limited affordability of access to financing.

“This is what I hope that BRI, by penetrating to the grassroots through BRILink agents, via digital, can penetrate and reach 29 million people who still do not have access to financing,” said the Minister of Finance at the BRI Microfinance Outlook 2024, Thursday (7/3).

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On the other hand, as many as 121.7 million MSMEs have received access to financing, consisting of 40 million KUR recipients, then 20 million recipients through people’s economic banks (BPR), 35 million recipients through special financial institutions, and 7.6 million through BLU. fund management called UMi.

“Meanwhile 17 million business actors have access to financing from peer-to-peer lending and various other institutions. Of course this is not just BRI’s task alone. The need for empowerment from the MSME side so that they are able to perform and have productivity and competitiveness is closely related to our desire to improve “Our trade and export performance must be higher,” said the Minister of Finance.

Indonesia needs to penetrate the export market, because it also needs imports. In fact, the lifestyle of many Indonesian people requires a lot of imports, from eating to traveling, such as Umrah. This means that Indonesian people import services from other places. If Indonesia is unable to generate foreign exchange, the economy will definitely face pressure.

Therefore, because Indonesia consumes goods and services from abroad, it must also be able to export goods and services so that external resilience is maintained. That means all parties must be able to increase the attractiveness of tourism in Indonesia, including at the retail level.

“Because at the same time there are more and more middle class people in Indonesia, the higher their consumption patterns are greatly influenced by goods and services from abroad. So we will continue to improve the performance of export MSMEs, including using instruments such as Indonesian export financing institutions,” said the Minister of Finance. (Z-2)