From nickel to Electric cars? Indonesia’s resource cum automotive industry policy

Abstract

This paper elucidates Indonesia’s resource-cum-industrial policy to leverage domestic nickel resources for building a localised value chain from mining to electric vehicles. The value chain is first mapped in order to facilitate the policy analysis. While Indonesia is successful in attracting investment projects which aim to build the value chain from mining to electric vehicle batteries within her borders, our analysis nevertheless finds that this process must be rather attributed to value chain lead firm strategy than Indonesian resource policy. Further, the final stage of electric vehicle assembly is only sparsely developed, suggesting that the attempted integration of forward linkage creation from mining and simultaneous backward linkage creation from vehicle assembly is not systematically deployed.