Indonesia’s foreign trade: the status quo and development prospects of the Asian Tiger

Foreign trade is one of the key areas of cooperation between the countries of the modern world. Assessing the current state of foreign trade seems to be as trivial as it is a complex task due to the integration of foreign trade into all other economic processes. Indonesia’s foreign trade is an extremely interesting subject of research due to the fact that Indonesia is one of the recognized economic leaders of Southeast Asia and, perhaps, a kind of “gateway to Asia” for competitive products from other regions of the world. An analysis of the trends and problems of the development of Indonesia’s foreign trade indicates that they are conditioned by the general state of the country’s economy. The prospects for further improvement of the structure and effectiveness of Indonesia’s foreign trade directly depend on the quality of the country’s national development strategy implementation. The purpose of the study is to identify the dynamics, structure and geography of Indonesia’s foreign trade and to determine its role and place among the ASEAN countries. Such research methods as analysis and synthesis, abstraction and transition from the abstract to the concrete, construction of analogies, statistical and comparative historical were used. As a result of the research conducted by the authors, it was found that the problems that are present in the field of Indonesia’s foreign trade are complex and interrelated. It has been established that the structure of Indonesia’s foreign trade is directly interrelated with the country’s integration into global value chains, models of economic development and socio-­economic indicators, etc.