The Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka is the latest to add his voice to calls for the free movement of people within the Pacific. That means the call has been supported now by leaders from Samoa, Solomon Islands and Fiji. The time for debating whether this idea should be taken seriously is over...
Category - Pacific migration and labour mobility
It pays to switch remittance service providers, so what’s stopping people?
The first blog in this series highlighted the large gap between low- and high-cost Remittance Service Providers (RSPs) in Tonga and other Pacific countries. The second showed that most people tend to use higher-cost options, thus keeping average realized remittance costs high. In this final blog in...
Customer choices are keeping Pacific remittance costs high
In our previous blog, we showed how remittance costs in Tonga could be much lower than the average calculated by Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) if households and workers chose low-cost Remittance Service Providers (RSPs). In this blog, we use the Pacific Labour Mobility Survey (PLMS) to show...
Remittance costs in the Pacific: measurement matters
Remittance costs in the Pacific are widely believed to be high. This blog shows how this common perception is a product of how such costs are measured. A different but reasonable approach paints a very different picture. The World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) website is often used to...
Pacific migration in 2024: seven things to watch out for
If you want a reminder just how far Australian Pacific migration policy has come, read the 2006...
Pacific Predictions: A look ahead at 2024
As the new year gets underway, now is the time to look ahead to what will be significant in the...
New data to inform big decisions around Pacific labour mobility
There has been much discussion about how the rapidly expanding labour mobility programs in...
Samoa’s shifting seasonal work priorities
In June 2021, hundreds of Samoans gathered outside the EFKS Youth Hall at Mulinu’u, arriving early...
Safety and wellbeing of PALM workers: room for improvement
The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme has been hailed as a triple win for the...
Australia-Tuvalu deal brings a visa-free Pacific closer
The announcement that Australia will provide 280 permanent residency visas to Tuvalu each year as...