Bali’s economy is basically agrarian: the vast majority of the Balinese are still simple peasants working in the fields. Coffee, copra and cattle are major agricultural exports; most of the rice goes to feed Bali’s own teeming population. Although the Balinese are an island people, their unusual tendency to focus on the mountains rather than the sea is reflected in the importance of fishing. While there are many fishing villages and fish are part of the Balinese diet, fishing as an activity is not on the scale you might expect, given how much ocean there is around the island. Tourism plays a considerable role in the Balinese economy, not only in providing accommodation, meals and services to many visitors but also in providing a market for all those arts and crafts!

With a per capita income of more than US$500 per annum, Bali today is one of Indonesia’s most prosperous islands. The standard of living is much lower on Java, where the “minimum wage” is only about Rp1000 per day. On Bali it’s Rp3500 or Rp4500 per day for day laborers-Rp5000 and up in Singaraja, Rp7500 in Ubud and Kuta. Only 10% of the island’s villages are without electricity. The number of new Mercedes 300 and BMW 5 series cars is striking-proportionally far more than in the States (well, excepting Palm Beach or Beverly Hills). The ones who have it really have it.

Rice growing and export about 100,000 tons annually - still dominates the economy, but tourism is catching up fast, employing an ever greater proportion of the population. In 1990, only 50% of the population was employed in agriculture. Besides rice, the Balinese grow tea, tobacco, cacao, copra, groundnuts, cassava, indigo, maize, onions, and legumes. Coffee is another major export crop, shipped primarily to Japan, the Netherlands, and the U.S.A.

In the days when barter was the major means of exchange, the man who owned many rice fields was considered very wealthy. Today, rice lands are steadily giving way to urban growth. Real estate and tourist development and the cash economies of the tourist and souvenir industries have become powerful agents of change in the egalitarian Balinese village. Now the Balinese want money - not bartered goods or labor-to buy consumer items, Hondas, cosmetics, electronics.