Indef Calls The Presidential Candidates Not Paying Attention To The Indonesian Sharia Capital Market

DOK ANTARA/Debat capres

JAKARTA - The Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (Indef) assesses that presidential and vice presidential candidates have not paid attention to the Islamic capital market in Indonesia.

"If I pay attention, the Islamic capital market has not become the concern of the three existing candidate pairs," said Head of the Sharia Economics Program Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (Indef) Fauziah Rizki Yuniarti quoting Antara.

For example, continued Fauziah, in the vision and mission document of the three candidate pairs, the mention of the word sharia is only about 5-8 times, where the most findings are in documents belonging to candidate pair Anies Baswedan-Muhaimin Iskandar or Cak Imin. Meanwhile, the word sukuk, as one of the main products of the Islamic capital market, is only mentioned once in the Anies-Imin document.

Apart from the vision-mission document, Fauziah believes that the three candidate pairs also rarely discuss the Islamic capital market, both in the debate to look for presidential and vice-presidential candidates to discussions by the economic team of each candidate.

According to him, each candidate focuses more on Islamic banking, which is often the main concern of conventional finance.

"Conventional finance is indeed difficult in banking. Meanwhile, if we look at it later, we will weigh it more in the capital market, because our sukuk is the leader in the world," he said.

Based on data from the 2022 Indonesian Sharia Financial Development Report (LPKSI) launched by the Financial Services Authority (OJK), the share of Islamic capital market assets is the largest among other sharia products, with a percentage reaching 60.08 percent.

Meanwhile, the share of Islamic banking assets was recorded at 33.77 percent and the assets of the Islamic non-bank financial industry (IKNB) were 6.15 percent of the total Islamic financial assets.

In addition to the positive performance in the domestic financial sector, the Indonesian Islamic capital market is also competing on a global scale. One of them can be seen in the achievement of ESG sukuk or Indonesian green sukuk which is ranked first in the accumulation of issuance during 2017-2022.

Meanwhile, Indonesia's sukuk performance generally occupies the third position after Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

"So, we have a strong Islamic capital market position. But, from the current conditions, both from existing documents and debates, the Islamic capital market has not become the attention of the three existing candidate pairs," said Fauziah.