The Indonesian government announced on Monday that the moratorium on hiring new civil servants was lifted at the end of December, 16 months after it was instituted, but that stringent recruitment policies would be maintained.

Vice President Boediono said that the essence of the moratorium would still be continued – zero growth policy. "The efforts to improve the employment policy and system will be intensified by, among others, adjusting the needs analysis for civil servants and the budget cycle," Boediono said in a press release obtained by Jakarta Globe.

The moratorium, which began in September 2011, was aimed at stemming the ballooning cost of running the bureaucracy, organizational restructuring and rightsizing, civil servant redistribution, transparent recruitment and improving civil servant professionalism.

According to data from the Civil Service Administration Board (BAKN), Indonesia had 4.64 million civil servants in October 2011. As of the end of 2012, Indonesia had 4.46 million civil servants, or 1.9 percent of the country's 241 million population.

In the future, Boediono said there would be three requirements before hiring new employees. The first is for ministries and other government institutions to have a five-year human resource plan, backed by position analysis and work-load analysis, that is in line with the civil servant redistribution plan. Government offices should also conduct an open, fair, clean, efficient and accountable recruitment process.

Second, only government offices that spend less than 50 percent of their total budgets for employees would be allowed to hire. Third, recruitment can only be done after receiving approval from the National Committee for Bureaucracy Reform, which is chaired by Boediono.

Azwar Abubakar, the minister for administrative reform, has said the government had a budget of Rp 212 trillion for civil servant salaries in 2012 and planned to allocate Rp 241 trillion in 2013's budget, which accounts for 15 percent of the total budget spending.

According to the Indonesian Forum for Budget Transparency (FITRA), the Rp 241 trillion budget was only for civil servants working for the central government. Another Rp 306 trillion would be used to pay the salaries of civil servants working in regional administrations throughout the country.