Let's make Indonesia richer.
How much richer? Ohh... let's double per capita GDP. That's a lot, but not, I think, completely insane -- it would make the average Indonesian somewhat richer than the average Chinese, about equal to the low end of post-Communist Europe (Ukraine, Bosnia or Albania).
How do we do it? Well, OTL Indonesia sort of staggered along under Sukarno, then had almost 30 years of hothouse growth under Suharto, then got hit hard by the Asian economic crisis of '97-'98 and lost nearly a decade of growth. To double pcGDP, we need a POD pretty far back. For simplicity's sake, I'll wave my hand and say "better Sukarno", without going into too much detail about what "better" means. But let's say the outcome is an average of 1% more growth per year from the mid-1950s until 1997, and then a much less destructive crisis -- a recession rather than a crash.
This will give us an Indonesian economy about 80%-90% bigger than OTL's. We'll get the rest by having Indonesia enter the demographic transition earlier; more wealth means smaller families, after all. The difference will be small at first, but by the 1990s quite noticeable, and by 2008 *Indonesia will have a population about 10% smaller than iOTL.
I'm going to make the optimistic assumption that while nothing is necessarily better in *Indonesia, nothing is worse -- i.e., the Gini coefficient isn't higher, so the extra wealth isn't all concentrated at the top; corruption, human rights, you name it, they're all no worse than iOTL if not better.
For simplicity's sake -- and yes, I know this is a stretch -- let's assume that up until the early 2000s, Indonesian history proceeds broadly as iOTL. So, Suharto succeeds Sukarno, boom-boom years, crisis, Suharto steps down, und so weiter. Let's allow East Timor out in 2002; after that things can diverge more widely.
So: we've just doubled the wealth of the world's fourth-largest country.
Now what?
Doug M.
How much richer? Ohh... let's double per capita GDP. That's a lot, but not, I think, completely insane -- it would make the average Indonesian somewhat richer than the average Chinese, about equal to the low end of post-Communist Europe (Ukraine, Bosnia or Albania).
How do we do it? Well, OTL Indonesia sort of staggered along under Sukarno, then had almost 30 years of hothouse growth under Suharto, then got hit hard by the Asian economic crisis of '97-'98 and lost nearly a decade of growth. To double pcGDP, we need a POD pretty far back. For simplicity's sake, I'll wave my hand and say "better Sukarno", without going into too much detail about what "better" means. But let's say the outcome is an average of 1% more growth per year from the mid-1950s until 1997, and then a much less destructive crisis -- a recession rather than a crash.
This will give us an Indonesian economy about 80%-90% bigger than OTL's. We'll get the rest by having Indonesia enter the demographic transition earlier; more wealth means smaller families, after all. The difference will be small at first, but by the 1990s quite noticeable, and by 2008 *Indonesia will have a population about 10% smaller than iOTL.
I'm going to make the optimistic assumption that while nothing is necessarily better in *Indonesia, nothing is worse -- i.e., the Gini coefficient isn't higher, so the extra wealth isn't all concentrated at the top; corruption, human rights, you name it, they're all no worse than iOTL if not better.
For simplicity's sake -- and yes, I know this is a stretch -- let's assume that up until the early 2000s, Indonesian history proceeds broadly as iOTL. So, Suharto succeeds Sukarno, boom-boom years, crisis, Suharto steps down, und so weiter. Let's allow East Timor out in 2002; after that things can diverge more widely.
So: we've just doubled the wealth of the world's fourth-largest country.
Now what?
Doug M.
This WI is actually quite possible.