Maritime Cluster Development Model: A Catalyst for Indonesia’s Economic Growth

Talking about cluster, the first thing that comes to your mind must be a housing cluster. Well, the concept maybe a little bit similar but no, it’s not that kind of cluster we’re talking about. Maritime cluster is an agglomeration of maritime related companies that working together causing beneficial effects for each other.

Indonesia, as a large archipelago country, with two thirds of its territory consist of water, should have pay more attention to its maritime industry to support its economic growth. Even though Indonesia has a lot of maritime industry sectors (E.g. Fishery, logistic transportation, shipbuilding, aquaculture processing, etc), Indonesia has not been able to maximize the potential of them all. This issue can be seen from the contribution of maritime sector in Indonesia that does not reach 20% of the total value of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), whereas in other fellow maritime countries, their maritime sector able to contribute by up to 50% of its total GDP.

Maritime cluster could be one of the solution to help Indonesia boost its maritime sector. The concept of maritime cluster itself most commonly trending in European countries like Norway, Netherlands, and Germany. According to Chang (2012), maritime cluster will benefit the company it’s in in a 3 way, (1) Institution will working with higher efficiency, (2) Will promote to innovate, and (3) Enhance business. The concept of maritime cluster is also aligned with the President’s vision to make Indonesia as the world maritime fulcrum.

According to Wijnolst (2006), maritime cluster could give advantages for the companies in the form of knowledge dissemination, availability of skilled workforce, strong innovative culture, and in the long run, could enhance the economic for the country. Benchmarking with the maritime cluster at the European countries, the researcher discovered that if Indonesia implements maritime cluster policy, Indonesia will enhance its economic through its GDP and Employment rate by an additional of 2-4% compared when Indonesia does not implement the policy. The effect given by the cluster increased alongside with the increase of cluster size with an exponential trend (Wijnolst, 2006).

The research was conducted using system dynamics model. The model was divided in three sub-modules; Industry, Workforce, and Economic module. The data for each module were gathered through secondary source, let it be Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS), Kementerian Perindustrian, Kementerian UMKM, etc. The simulation was running from 2010 – 2039, considering that strategic policy usually takes a long time to give significant result.

Our model results conclude that implementing maritime cluster policy in Indonesia will give significant result to Indonesia economic growth. However, for future research, the researcher recommends to also include sustainability aspect, role of technology, as well as culture of innovation towards the development of the Indonesia’s maritime cluster. With those in mind, Indonesia will have a bright future for its maritime industry to continue growing and be the main sector of driving force for Indonesia’s economic growth.

This research is conducted by Aditya Nursyamsi and Armand Omar Moeis