10th Economic Events (Eccents) is an annual event held by the economics student society of Universitas Airlangga. This year, Eccents raised the theme of demographic bonus optimization to answer the challenge of sustainable development. Eccents consisted of few stages. The first stage was the abstract submission and the best 40 abstracts were chosen to proceed to the next stage. The 40 teams were required to submit a full paper to pass to the next stage. By analyzing the paper, the committee chose the best 10 teams and invited them to Faculty of Economy and Business Universitas Airlangga to compete in the final stage.
One of the Universitas Gadjah Mada team managed to pass to the final stage. The name of the team was the i-Invest team which consist of Cahyo Satrio Pratama, Safira Andrista, and Reza Bangun Mahardika from Economics Department Universitas Gadjah Mada Batch 2013. The i-Invest team presented a paper entitled "The Role of SME as the Bonus Demographic Container in Indonesia: Analysis of the SME Growth and Employment from World Bank Enterprises Survey 2015". The i-Invest team used a micro data from World Bank Enterprise Survey to analyze the factors of the SME growth since i-Invest team believe that SME can be the container of the demographic bonus in Indonesia. This paper managed to bring the i-Invest team to the final stage in Universitas Airlangga. This final stage consisted of three smaller stages. Those were study case, debate, and presentation stage and it was held at May 18th to 20th 2017.
The debate stage was being held on May 18th 2017. The i-Invest team faced another UGM team in this debate. The theme of the debate was "Foreign investment as the provider of employment". As a negative team, the i-Invest team did a good job and the judges gave a compliment to i-Invest team.
Study case and presentation stage was being held on the following day. In the study case stage, the i-Invest team had to answer a question about the brain drain phenomenon in Indonesia. The team only had 3 minutes to answer the question and they did well. The last stage is the presentation stage. The i-Invest team’s paper had successfully admired by the judges. Even though there were some difficult questions, the i-invest team still managed to pass this stage.
At May 20th 2017, the entire teams were having a field trip and gala dinner. All of the winners were announced at the gala dinner and i-Invest team managed to win the 1st place in the 10th Eccents Paper Competition 2017.
Source: Reza/FEBUGM