Benchmarking Intangible Assets in the Water Sector: an Evidence from Indonesia

This article aims to provide an empirical evidence of the value of intellectual capital, as a proxy of intangible assets, in the water sector. It is very interesting considering there are only a few researches that explore the value of the intellectual capital in this sector and is expected to fill the gap of the literature review. This study presumed that the value of intellectual capital in the water sector is low in view of the fact that it is a capital-intensive sector. It adopted the value added intellectual coefficient (VAIC (TM)) as the instrument to measure the value of intellectual capital. The data were collected during the year of 2013-2015 from 253 municipal water utilities (MWUs) in Indonesia consisting of 83 MWUs in 2013, 79 MWUs in 2014, and 91 MWUs in 2015. It was found that the average VAIC (TM) value was 2.082 and the range values were between 1.157 and 4.298. This wide range indicates a gap between MWUs. Even another result performs that half of the MWUs have sustainable criteria. Finally, this research recommends MWUs management to re-evaluate human capital policies due to the low value of intellectual capital, so that the bigger amount of investment in human capital would not be wasted.