Statistically Invisible: Regional Development Banks and Ownership-Based Disclosure

Abstract

Indonesia's twenty-seven regional development banks are owned by provincial and district governments and hold assets exceeding 985 trillion rupiah. The international literature identifies government-owned banks as a distinct analytical category associated with lower profitability, higher non-performing loans, and lending patterns responsive to electoral cycles, which makes ownership the variable of primary interest for any assessment of them. This study set out to assess their financial performance and encountered an obstacle that became its principal finding: the national banking supervisor no longer publishes aggregate financial ratios by ownership category, having reorganised its statistical reporting around capital-based groupings. Of the standard prudential ratios, only capital adequacy could be verified for the group. The study therefore reports what remains verifiable and analyses the disclosure gap itself. On the available indicators the group underperforms the industry on both intermediation and capitalisation, with credit growing 7.55 per cent against 10.92 per cent and capital adequacy at 24.86 per cent against 27.02 per cent. Consumer lending constitutes 64.64 per cent of the loan book. The study argues that reorganising banking statistics around capital rather than ownership has rendered invisible precisely the dimension on which the international evidence indicates performance differs, and that ownership-based reporting should be restored alongside the current groupings.