EU fuels Indonesia trade tensions with 5-year biodiesel tariffs
![](https://euromenaenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/428872.jpg)
BRUSSELS: The European Union imposed five-year tariffs on biodiesel from Indonesia to counter alleged subsidies to producers in the country, a move that could prompt the Indonesian government to retaliate.
The EU duties on Indonesian exporters of this type of biofuel, which is made from vegetable oils and animal fats for use in diesel engines, range from 8% to 18%, the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, said on Monday.
The levies mark the definitive outcome of an EU probe into claims by the European biodiesel industry that the Indonesian government gives trade-distorting aid to the likes of PT Ciliandra Perkasa, PT Wilmar Bioenergi Indonesia and PT Musim Mas.
Subsidised exports of Indonesian biodiesel to the EU are causing “a threat of material injury to the union industry, ” the Brussels-based commission said in the bloc’s Official Journal. The definitive anti-subsidy duties will take effect on Tuesday and follow provisional levies introduced in August at the same levels.
The five-year import taxes are the latest twist in a long-running EU trade dispute with Indonesia over biodiesel and mirror a fight the bloc has had with Argentina.
The duties restore a degree of protection that European biodiesel producers such as Verbio Vereinigte BioEnergie AG lost in 2018 when the EU scrapped tariffs aimed at countering alleged below-cost — or “dumped” — sales in the bloc by Indonesian exporters.
That move followed successful Indonesian challenges against the anti-dumping duties, which had been introduced in 2013, at the World Trade Organization and in the EU courts.
Indonesian retaliation
The EU opened the subsidy inquiry in December 2018 and the Indonesian trade minister said in August this year that, should the bloc decide to apply new biodiesel levies of 8% to 18%, Indonesia would raise its tariffs on European dairy goods to the same levels (from 5% to 10%).
The EU duty rates vary depending on the Indonesian producer. The levels are 8% for Ciliandra Perkasa, 15.7% for the Wilmar Group, 16.3% for the Musim Mas Group and 18% for the Permata Group and all other Indonesian biodiesel exporters.
Indonesian exporters’ combined share of the EU biodiesel market rose to 3.3% — or 516,088 metric tons — in the 12 months through September 2018 from 0.2% in 2017 and 0.3% in 2016, according to the commission.
Renewable-energy trade tensions between Europe and Indonesia have also grown as a result of a separate EU decision this year restricting the types of biofuels from palm oil that may be counted toward the bloc’s renewable-energy goals. In Indonesia, palm oil is the main raw material for making biodiesel.
Both sides are fighting over steel as well. The EU has complained to the WTO about Indonesian export curbs on raw materials including nickel that are used to make stainless steel and is threatening to hit flat-rolled stainless steel from Indonesia with duties to counter alleged subsidies and below-cost sales. – Bloomberg
This is hardly the only reason why GDP is an inadequate measure of human wellbeing. It also ignores people’s need for respect, dignity, liberty, health, rule of law, community, and a clean environment. But even if all of these other democratic “goods” were satisfied, GDP still would fail as a metric of progress, purely in terms of income alone.
Building on work by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, the Center for Equitable Growth has proposed “GDP 2.0,” a metric that would complement existing aggregate GDP reports by disaggregating the income growth of different cross sections of the population (such as income quintiles). Providing this kind of distributional picture regularly would require increased coordination among government departments, as well as some conventions on, for example, how to use tax data to complement the usual national accounts. But conventions are also needed for existing national income accounting.
Provided that distributional data are routinely available, one could compute a growth rate based on the weighted average across each decile of the income distribution, with equal weighting for population, as in the example above. Individuals would still be weighed by their incomes within each group (which is why it would be preferable to use deciles rather than quintiles), but the final product would be much closer than current methods to the “democratic” ideal.
One of the main advantages of GDP growth is that it is expressed with a single number, whereas other performance indicators either are presented within dashboards comprising multiple metrics or aggregated in essentially arbitrary ways. The implicit use of income shares as aggregation weights is perfectly appropriate for macroeconomic analysis and is not arbitrary. The problem arises when GDP becomes a proxy for progress. What we can measure easily and communicate elegantly inevitably determines what we will focus on as a matter of policy. As the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi report put it, “What we measure affects what we do.”
Publishing a democratic metric like the growth rate of GDP 2.0 is no pipedream. A GDP growth rate using equal weights for each decile of the population would also produce a single number to complement the usual growth rate. True, it still would not capture the substantial differences within the top decile in many countries where the top 1% have been gaining disproportionately compared to everyone else. And we still would need other metrics to measure performance in dimensions other than income. But as a single figure published alongside GDP growth, it could go a long way toward changing the dominant conversation about economic performance.