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Economy & Policy

Gunungkidul’s Poverty Rate Fell in 2025. Tourism Alone Cannot Take Credit.

· Infowisata.id Editorial Team · ~6 min read

Gunungkidul’s poverty rate fell from 15.18% in 2024 to 14.15% in 2025. The improvement matters, but the trend does not prove tourism caused it. Understanding the difference requires looking at other income sources and the evidence behind causal claims.

A village street in Gunungkidul with homes and small local businesses

A better poverty figure is progress without proving a cause

Gunungkidul’s poverty rate declined in 2025. The regency government’s 2025 performance report, drawing on official statistics, records a fall from 15.18% in 2024 to 14.15% in 2025. The estimated number of residents living below the poverty line decreased from 120,410 to 113,480 over the same period. The poverty line rose from IDR 401,209 per person per month in 2024 to IDR 413,617 in 2025, so the comparison reflects a changing threshold rather than a fixed nominal amount.

These are meaningful improvements. But they do not answer a separate question: how much, if any, of the decline was caused by tourism?

A timeline can show that two things happened in the same period. It cannot by itself establish that one caused the other. Tourism activity, poverty, wages, agricultural income, commodity prices, migration, public assistance, and other economic conditions can change at the same time. Crediting one sector without testing these competing explanations would turn a useful statistic into an unsupported story.

The figures above appear in the Gunungkidul Regency Government’s 2025 performance accountability report (LKjIP) (opens in a new tab). The report gives the poverty rate for the regency and includes comparisons with the Special Region of Yogyakarta (DIY) and Indonesia as a whole.

Poverty has fallen, but the remaining challenge is substantial

At 14.15% in 2025, Gunungkidul’s poverty rate remained above the reported DIY rate of 10.23% and the national rate of 8.57%. Within DIY, the report places Gunungkidul’s rate below Kulon Progo’s 14.53%, making it the second-highest among the regency and city jurisdictions shown.

That context matters. A falling rate should not be presented as proof that the problem has been solved. The poverty headcount and poverty rate also answer slightly different questions: the rate describes the share of the population below the poverty line, while the headcount describes the estimated number of people. Both are useful, and both need to be read alongside the poverty line and the broader economic conditions of households.

The report also shows declines in the poverty-gap index and poverty-severity index between 2024 and 2025. These measures are intended to say more than how many people fall below the line: they help describe how far poor households are, on average, below the line and the severity of the distribution among poor households. They are not direct measures of tourism’s influence, however.

How tourism could help, and why the mechanism must be demonstrated

Tourism can contribute to household income through several channels. A person may be hired by an accommodation provider, transport operator, restaurant, attraction, or tour service. A farmer or fisher may sell ingredients to a restaurant. A craft producer may gain access to a new market. A local government may collect legally established taxes or retributions and use public funds for services or infrastructure.

Those pathways are plausible. Their existence does not tell us how much income they generate, who receives it, or whether the income is stable enough to change a household’s poverty status. Some jobs are seasonal; some businesses rely on suppliers outside the regency; some households have multiple income sources; and some people may not be able to access tourism employment because of location, skills, transport, care responsibilities, or capital constraints.

A tourism-oriented district can also have residents who do not benefit directly from visitor spending. And poverty reduction may be driven partly by non-tourism factors, including agricultural production, other local industries, public transfers, demographic changes, or labor-market movement. These are explanatory possibilities that should be tested, not assumed to have caused the observed change.

What would stronger evidence look like?

A serious evaluation would start with a defined question. For example: did households with greater access to tourism employment or tourism-linked markets experience larger income gains than comparable households with less exposure?

Answering that would require data that connect economic activity to household outcomes. Useful evidence could include:

  • Household income and poverty status over time, with income sources separated where possible.
  • Employment and earnings in tourism-related businesses, including contract status, hours, seasonality, and social protection.
  • Comparable information from villages or households with different levels of tourism exposure.
  • Changes in agricultural income, non-tourism employment, social assistance, local prices, and migration that might also influence poverty.
  • A transparent evaluation method that accounts for differences between the groups being compared and avoids treating a simple before-and-after change as a causal estimate.

No single dashboard will automatically settle the question. But data collected consistently can make it possible to test mechanisms and improve the quality of policy decisions. If the goal is to determine whether tourism reduces poverty, visitor numbers alone are not enough.

Evaluate the quality of the gains behind the poverty headline

A decline in poverty is a positive outcome regardless of which policy or sector contributed to it. The policy challenge is to identify which changes helped, which households remain vulnerable, and what can be improved or expanded without exaggerating the evidence.

For tourism policy, this means moving beyond broad claims that a busy destination automatically makes a community more prosperous. Authorities can report how many jobs are supported, what workers earn, whether employment continues outside peak periods, how much businesses buy from local suppliers, and whether tourism-linked income reaches households with lower incomes. Local surveys can be designed to protect respondents’ privacy and clearly distinguish measured responses from estimates.

The same standard should apply to criticism. It is not enough to say tourism has no benefit because poverty remains high, just as it is not enough to say tourism caused poverty to fall because the two trends overlap. Both claims require evidence.

A careful conclusion

Gunungkidul’s poverty rate fell by 1.03 percentage points between 2024 and 2025, and the estimated poverty headcount fell by 6,930 people based on the rounded published figures. Those changes deserve recognition. The regency nevertheless remained above the poverty rates reported for DIY and Indonesia.

The available official data establish the poverty trend; they do not isolate tourism’s causal contribution. The next step is to measure income pathways, compare groups and periods carefully, and identify the policies that actually help households move out of poverty and remain there, before assigning credit or blame.

Sources consulted

Keep reading

This article is part 2 of 12 in the series "Gunungkidul's Tourism Economy, Explained".

Related articles:

  • Gunungkidul
  • Poverty
  • Tourism Policy
  • Regional Development
  • BPS
  • local economy

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