About
How the research and the procurement work fit together.
I am an economist and PhD candidate in the Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Indonesia, and a civil servant in the Provincial Government of North Sulawesi. My work has two strands that are usually kept apart: empirical research on how local economies and institutions hold up under strain, and professional practice in Indonesian public procurement. They share a single question: how public resources and collective capacity are actually allocated when institutions are under strain.
My dissertation, Shaking Land and Shaking Lives: Essays on the Economic Impacts of Seismic Disasters, asks what a damaging earthquake does to a village once the rubble is cleared. The answer is not one-directional. Reported communal conflict falls after damage-level shaking, while theft rises sharply on the same villages in the same waves: not a general improvement in security, but a change in the kind of violence a community can produce. Much of the work behind that result is infrastructure rather than estimation, harmonising two decades of village boundary change onto a constant reference year and turning seismic intensity surfaces into village-level exposure. It is unglamorous, largely unavailable off the shelf in Indonesia, and where most of the credibility of the results comes from.
Before graduate school I entered the civil service through IPDN, and my early posts in North Sulawesi were in asset management and procurement: procurement officer, then commitment-making official responsible for contracts, then member of the provincial selection working group, authorised to determine winning providers for procurements up to IDR 100 billion. From 2021 to 2023 I led the provincial sub-division responsible for procurement advisory and technical guidance, and since 2018 I have worked nationally as a certified facilitator, competency assessor, and advisor.
That practical experience shaped what I find worth studying. Procurement is where formal rules meet local discretion, and where the gap between what a regulation requires and what an official can actually do is most visible. My master’s thesis used Indonesia’s e-procurement records to ask whether more bidders produce better outcomes.
The longer-term agenda is to keep both strands running: rigorous empirical economics on shocks, institutions, and local public goods in Indonesia, and a serious contribution to the professionalisation of Indonesian public procurement, including writing about procurement practice for practitioners, not only for regulators.