Indonesia Achieves First-Half Investment Target Amid Global Uncertainty, Experts Urge Policy Consistency

JAKARTA - Investment realization in the first semester of 2026 has reached IDR 1,010.6 trillion, or around 49.5 percent of this year's target. This figure indicates that Indonesia's investment attractiveness is still quite maintained amid global economic uncertainty. M Rizal Taufikurahman, Head of the Center for Macroeconomics and Finance of the Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (Indef), stated that the realization in the first semester shows a smooth start towards achieving the annual investment target. However, Rizal highlighted that the challenge in the second semester is no longer about attracting investment commitments, but rather about ensuring that these investments are immediately realized into productive projects. He stressed that the government needs to accelerate the execution of projects by simplifying licensing, providing regulatory certainty, accelerating infrastructure development, and resolving various obstacles in the field. "This means that investment is not only high in nominal terms, but also able to drive economic growth and increase national production capacity," he said. Rizal views that Indonesia's investment climate still has relatively good resilience because it is supported by the size of the domestic market, the downstream agenda, and the macroeconomic stability that remains maintained. However, investors in the second half are expected to be more selective due to high global uncertainty, geopolitical tensions, and high funding costs. This condition makes investments tend to flow into sectors that offer certainty of profit and high added value, such as mineral processing, manufacturing, digital economy, data centers, energy, and logistics. "Thus, policy consistency is a key factor for Indonesia to remain competitive compared to other investment destination countries in the region," said Rizal. Meanwhile, the realization of investment in the first semester of 2026 managed to absorb 1.44 million workers, an increase of 15 percent compared to the same period last year, based on records from the Ministry of Investment and Industrialization/BKPM. Rizal views that this increase in labor absorption is a positive development, but it is not enough to conclude that the investment has been qualified. "The success of investment is not only determined by the number of jobs created, but more importantly by productivity, wage levels, technology transfer, improvement of labor skills, and the magnitude of the added value generated," he said. For this reason, according to Rizal, the orientation of investment policies needs to shift from merely pursuing the amount of realization to more productive, inclusive, and sustainable investments so that they can strengthen the competitiveness of national industries while improving people's welfare.