Manggarai Barat Plan Notes Tourism’s GDP Share Fell in 2019–2020

Labuan Bajo — Manggarai Barat’s 2021–2026 regional medium‑term development plan adopts tourism as a main driver of local economic growth, and records that the sector’s contribution to regional gross domestic product fell between 2019 and 2020, although the plan does not publish the detailed percentage figures in its narrative chapters.

The plan, known as the RPJMD, sets out the regency’s development priorities and aligns them with the longer‑term Regional Long‑Term Development Plan for 2015–2025 and national policy that designates Labuan Bajo as a super‑priority tourism destination, according to the official RPJMD document and related planning reports.

In its discussion of economic structure, the RPJMD notes that the contribution of the tourism sector to Manggarai Barat’s PDRB — the Indonesian term for regional gross domestic product — decreased between 2019 and 2020. A supporting table on tourism’s contribution to PDRB for 2016–2020 is referenced in the document, but the publicly accessible PDF versions do not present that table in a way that allows readers to extract the precise year‑by‑year percentage shares from the narrative text alone.

The plan’s statistical annexes and related planning materials describe tourism’s contribution in two ways: as nominal values in rupiah and as a percentage share of total regional output. These distinctions matter for interpretation. A sector’s percentage share of PDRB can decline even if its nominal rupiah value rises, if other sectors grow faster, and the reverse is also possible.

The RPJMD situates these figures within a broader economic context. Chapter II describes general regional conditions, community welfare and economic equality, using sectoral PDRB tables to show how different business fields contribute to overall output, rather than as a standalone tourism report. Additional documents such as the regency’s smart‑city masterplan and diagnostic studies reinforce that tourism is treated as an economic locomotive connected to other sectors including services, infrastructure and local enterprise.

Tourism as a strategic development issue

The RPJMD’s policy chapters identify tourism as a strategic development issue for 2021–2026. One of the plan’s core missions is to “develop tourism in a sustainable and inclusive manner as the main driver of the economy”, according to planning texts from the regency government. Tourism appears alongside other strategic themes such as agriculture, human‑resource competitiveness, economic stability, infrastructure and public administration.

Planning documents emphasise that the national designation of Labuan Bajo as a super‑priority tourism destination requires local government to respond by building a more conducive investment climate and integrating tourism with sustainable development goals. The regional diagnostic report highlights tourism as a priority sector and notes the need to deepen tourism value chains, including supporting infrastructure such as roads, water supply and waste management.

Limits of the published sector data

While the RPJMD confirms that tourism’s share of PDRB declined in 2019–2020, it does not, in its narrative sections, specify the exact percentage figures or directly attribute the change to particular causes such as the pandemic, travel restrictions or reclassification of activities. Readers therefore cannot use the plan alone to quantify the size of the decline or to separate structural factors from short‑term shocks.

The official statistics agency’s publication on Manggarai Barat’s PDRB by business field for 2016–2020 provides underlying sectoral data, but the publicly available summary requires further detailed tabulation to isolate the tourism category and match it exactly to the RPJMD’s tourism indicators. Planning texts also note that sectors linked to tourism show rising contributions over 2016–2020, even if the directly defined tourism category remains relatively small in percentage terms.

Other official reports, such as the regency’s 2021 local government performance report, give examples of tourism‑related PDRB values and overall PDRB totals for individual years, illustrating how a small percentage share can nonetheless represent tens of billions of rupiah. However, these documents focus on post‑2020 performance and do not reconstruct the full seasonal pattern or detailed 2019–2020 percentage changes.

As a result, the RPJMD and associated materials establish that tourism’s contribution to Manggarai Barat’s regional GDP is tracked and recognised as having declined between 2019 and 2020, but they stop short of publishing a complete, easily accessible set of percentage figures or seasonality tables for those years in the narrative sections available to the public.

Sources

• RPJMD Kabupaten Manggarai Barat Tahun 2021–2026 (official PDF)
• RPJMD Kabupaten Manggarai Barat Tahun 2021–2026 (Scribd copy)
• Produk Domestik Regional Bruto Kabupaten Manggarai Barat Menurut Lapangan Usaha 2016–2020