Regional autonomy is designed to increase the welfare of the community with the idea that regional government best understands what must be done in order to increase and improve human resources. The quality of human resources in a community can be a determining factor for the success of development initiatives in a region. Regional governments must be able to properly plan, to implement, and to evaluate regional budget allocations as they have direct impacts on regional gross regional domestic product (GRDP) as well as on measurable community welfare as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI). This study examines the relationship between government spending and human development in regional governments of Papua Province, Indonesia as measured by the HDI. A secondary analysis of government data and Human Development Index (HDI) data was conducted using structural equation modelling. The secondary analysis of regional government budget allocations and HDI data suggests that spending with the goal of improving the lives of community members seems to lead to an improvement of HDI. This study is focused on regional governments in one province of Indonesia. While its findings suggest that governments should make supporting human resources a priority if they hope to see improvement in HDI, similar studies should be conducted in other communities in order to see how different cultural or political settings affect the relationship between spending and HDI. This study adds to our understanding of development with its focus on Papua Province, an under-studied area in development research.

This paper investigates the changes in stock market returns before and after the announcement of a sample of three instalments, or ‘volumes’, (I, X, and XVI) of the Indonesian government’s Eco-nomic Policy Package (EPP), between 2015 and 2017. It tracks Abnormal Return (AR) and Cumulative Abnormal Return (CAR) on the Composite Stock Price Index (JCI) and ten sectorial indices of the Indonesia Stock Exchange. By testing for the direction and significance of differences in AR and CAR, the paper aims to clarify whether those announcements provided sufficient informational content to sway prices. The study finds that the impact of the policy announcements was recorded primarily by individual sectors, but did not elicit a significant market-wide response. Moreover, the majority of economic sectors consistently reacted negatively. This shows that, overall, capital markets did not feel those government policies contain sufficient measures to remove obstacles to busi-ness activity.

The prediction of stock prices movement has always been a concern for investors when they make investment decisions. Most of stock markets all over the world provide data on price to earnings ra-tio (P/E) and price to book value ratio (P/B). How reliable these data are for investment is not clear-ly known. This study examines how accounting data of P/E and P/B can predict the stock prices. The study selects data from 218 firms listed in Indonesian Stock Exchange as sample over the peri-od 2007-2016 and they are analyzed by multiple linear regression. The study shows that price to earnings ratio (P/E ratio) had no effect on stock prices for each year and also in all periods, but price to book value ratio (P/B ratio) had positive effect on stock prices, which means that the higher the P/B ratio, the more expensive the stock price. The decision of firm management is to maximize price to book value ratio (P/B ratio) which means to maximize the shareholders’ wealth. However, on the contrary, investors always seek the lower P/B ratio to get the desirable gains. Nevertheless, since the statistical analyses show there are many other variables affecting the stock prices movement, the investors should not rely only on P/B ratio for making investment decisions.