THE POLITICAL-ECONOMY MANAGEMENT: INDONESIA'S NEEDS FOR THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The Covid-19 outbreak continues to spread rapidly to almost all countries in the world. The authors need to highlight how the policy perspectives are taken by Indonesia at the national scale and international relations to improve the economic and political situation during this pandemic. Referring to this phenomenon, this research provides an in-depth study of the literature review on strategic efforts and steps to address commodity demand in Indonesia. In short, from an economic and political point of view, the dual problems on the supply and demand side make the premise of comparative advantage (which is the foundation of a free-market economy and international trade) into doubt about its validity. The classical premise argues that social welfare will be optimal if the state specializes in producing goods which are. Having the lowest opportunity cost according to the availability of production factors and buying other needs in the international market, it seems only valid if the international trade mechanism is not disrupted. Conversely, in conditions of supply and demand shocks, all countries will try to produce all their needs domestically and limit exporting products abroad as much as possible. Key words: national trade, global markets, export policy, import policy, Covid-19

Multimodal Data Guided Spatial Feature Fusion and Grouping Strategy for E-Commerce Commodity Demand Forecasting

E-commerce offers various merchandise for selling and purchasing with frequent transactions and commodity flows. An accurate prediction of customer needs and optimized allocation of goods is required for cost reduction. The existing solutions have significant errors and are unsuitable for addressing warehouse needs and allocation. That is why businesses cannot respond to customer demands promptly, as they need accurate and reliable demand forecasting. Therefore, this paper proposes spatial feature fusion and grouping strategies based on multimodal data and builds a neural network prediction model for e-commodity demand. The designed model extracts order sequence features, consumer emotional features, and facial value features from multimodal data from e-commerce products. Then, a bidirectional long short-term memory network- (BiLSTM-) based grouping strategy is proposed. The proposed strategy fully learns the contextual semantics of time series data while reducing the influence of other features on the group’s local features. The output features of multimodal data are highly spatially correlated, and this paper employs the spatial dimension fusion strategy for feature fusion. This strategy effectively obtains the deep spatial relations among multimodal data by integrating the features of each column in each group across spatial dimensions. Finally, the proposed model’s prediction effect is tested using e-commerce dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed algorithm’s effectiveness and superiority.

Analisis Kelayakan Pendirian Pusat Distribusi Provinsi (PDP) Jawa Barat

The purpose of this study was to analyze the feasibility of establishing a Provincial Distribution Center (PDP) in Purwakarta Regency, West Java which was assessed from the aspects of the Potential of Production Centers and Commodity Demand, Infrastructure, Socio-Economic Conditions, Environmental Conditions, Regional Spatial Plans, Regulations, Land and Actors. Distribution / Logistics Services. This research used Pairwise Comparison Matrix method. It was concluded that, Purwakarta Regency was deemed appropriate and sufficient in determining the criteria as a Provincial Distribution Center.

A Shift or Priority? An Afrocentric Analysis of Zuma’s Foreign Policy towards China

Zuma’s ascendancy to the South African Presidency coincided with the lingering global economic crisis of 2007-2009, which affected many of the Western economies. By this time, China experienced a rapid economic growth and became a potential partner for commodities exporting countries like South Africa. As such, it became a potential partner in the face of declining commodity demand from the West. Against this background, Zuma deepened South Africa’s ties with China to rescue the domestic economy. China has since received much attention in Zuma’s administration resulted in many scholars emanating from International Relations and other cognate academic disciplines and members of the media describing the move as a shift in South Africa’s foreign policy. This article employs Afrocentricity as an alternative theoretical framework to interrogate the question as to whether closer ties between the two countries marked a shift or Zuma prioritised China. Methodologically, this is a desktop article that relied on secondary data and employed an Afrocentric qualitative research methodology to establish whether the deepening relations led to a shift in South Africa’s foreign policy or China received priority in Zuma’s administration.

Covid-19 and Mining industry

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the commodity markets and mining industry around the world in different ways. Mining company’s operations have been hit by coronavirus outbreaks and government-mandated production stops. Demand for many commodities remains low. This paper examines the potential long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on future commodity demand, mining prospects, as well as tactical and strategic steps by mining companies to overcome the current crisis quickly and effectively.

Marx, Say’s Law and Commodity Money

Under Marx’s critique of Say’s Law, as originally devised by Say and James Mill, money hoarding leads to a shortfall in aggregate demand. This paper responds to a Post Keynesian argument that hoarding does not restrict aggregate demand since for Marx money consists of a produced commodity, and hoarding is just one form of commodity demand. Drawing on Marx’s monetary writings, a new monetary equilibrium is suggested in which produced gold is used to replace wear and tear in circulation. An alternative critique of Say’s Law is thus proposed as a contribution to understanding the complexity of Marx’s monetary foundations.

Winners and Losers from a Commodities-for-Manufactures Trade Boom

A recent boom in commodities-for-manufactures trade between China and other developing countries has led to much concern about the losers from rising import competition in manufacturing, but little attention on the winners from growing Chinese demand for commodities. Using census data for Brazil, we find that local labour markets more affected by Chinese import competition experienced slower growth in manufacturing wages between 2000 and 2010. However, we observe faster wage growth in locations benefiting from rising Chinese commodity demand during the same period.