About this Event
We are thrilled to invite you to the upcoming session of the Research Seminar Series at the Asia School of Business, featuring Professor Lena Rethel.
Seminar Title:
State-led Financialisation and Subnational Growth Regimes: Reinforcing Spatial and Socioeconomic Inequalities in Indonesia
Event Details:
đź“… Date: 19 November 2025
⏰ Time: 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
đź“Ť Venue: CR-W2-03, Level 2, Asia School of Business
About the Speaker: Lena Rethel is Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, from where she also obtained her PhD. Lena’s research focuses on the intersection of finance and development. Her most recent, co-authored book is I-PEEL: The International Political Economy of Everyday Life, published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Previously, Lena was the lead editor of the Review of International Political Economy and has held positions as a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University and as a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Her earlier work on Islamic economies was supported by a research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Lena’s current project “The Politics of Financial Citizenship (FinDem)” is informed by the overarching research question of how middle-class expectations shape financial policy and politics in emerging market democracies.
Abstract: For the past thirty or so years, financial development has been a priority item on the policy agenda of countries seeking to escape the middle income trap. However, the extent to which this focus has contributed to shifts in economic growth and household strategies of wealth accumulation is still underexplored. This article examines attempts by successive Indonesian governments to support the emergence of new growth regimes through state capitalist interventions in domestic financial markets, specifically the state-led development of the domestic capital market and the state-led financialization of housing. Heeding recent calls in the growth models literature to move beyond methodological nationalism and incorporate spatial inequality, this article identifies distinct subnational growth regimes across the regions of Indonesia. It argues that state capitalist interventions to advance financial deepening primarily benefit metropolitan areas, in particular the greater Jakarta region. In so doing, these interventions support a distinct debt-financed, consumption-led growth model that seeks to boost consumer demand and the services sector, and to encourage real estate development. We further show that the impact of state capitalist interventions to deepen financialisation are highly uneven socioeconomically both across Indonesia’s main regions and within the metropolitan consumption-led growth regime. (Upper) Middle-class households, particularly in the metropolitan areas, are able to use greater access to finance to accumulate wealth while lower income groups are limited to using debt for consumption purposes.
We look forward to your participation in this insightful research seminar.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Asia School of Business (ASB) Academic, 11 Jalan Dato Onn, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
USD 0.00
