Comments

Well said and that is the normal culture up in the highlands, especially the four highlands Provinces, WHP, ENGA, SHP AND HELA. There needs to be some strong measures in place to tighten up the in flow of ammunition. If the ammunition is closely monitored then I believe the guns are gonna be useless in the long run. I think that's going to be the best option for long lasting peace and also to minimize the progress of creating problems. Thanks.

Hi Carolyn, Very good read. I have witnessed vast sums wasted by international agencies who seem to think a rotation role inn a SID is a sabbatical. Spend money badly in the wrong place with little DD, move on to the next SID, rinse and repeat. Private enterprise needs to be involved with tangible long term social, economic and environmental gains being clearly identified and measured against funding agreements. The sooner the current all care no responsibility branding exercise of the global agency groups is managed back, the sooner funding will see improved outcomes. Regards

In Canberra, we have two cafes (in Curtin and Duffy) that sell both the beans grown in the PNG highlands and a cup of coffee made from them. It's direct action that supports those growers. It's also excellent coffee.

Hi Jamie. Thank you for your interest in the Pacific Attitudes Survey. The data gap we were refer to here is related to international popular political attitudes surveys. Notably, the Global Barometer regularly conducts similar surveys in all global regions, except the Pacific. With the PAS we aim to bridge this gap, so that Pacific voices can be heard in these international conversations. As you'll see in the full report, the PAS: Vanuatu was conducted in partnership and co-authored with the National University of Vanuatu and the University of the South Pacific Emalus campus. Partnership activities included survey design and translation workshops, which included the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta and other Vanuatu civil society organisations. The VNSO generously provided national census data for our sampling. PAS data will be available online shortly and can certainly be used to help inform national policy formulation and responses to SDGs. See the PAS webpage for further information https://bellschool.anu.edu.au/dpa/our-research-dpa/pacific-attitudes-survey

Hi Nik, good to hear from you! I like your comment and would love to learn more about the "nonsense" including the role played by tourism in the economy of Vanuatu and Samoa. It'd be even better if you could write us some blogs 🙂 That would be very helpful to improve the quality of my economic analysis.

Hi Paul. Thanks for the comment and analysis. It is helpful to get these results for comparison and I am interested in looking further into this. Your approach probably fits the Pacific better, but we opted for purchasing power parity for global comparisons. But as you and Nik point out, the key message from this blog is to emphasize the importance of holding data accountable to facts. Admittedly, international comparisons of economic performance through time are difficult. Therefore, it is important that people can keep in mind the difficulties and limitations to interpret data in a more sensible way.

A colleague pointed out that FSM is listed as Micronesia in the WEO database (why did I miss that?). Anyway, doing the same calculations on national currency GDP - increase of 16.8%, converted into real terms to allow for CPI average inflation - 14.6% - and then population loss of 3.1%, FSM/Micronesia ends up at -1.3%. This is considerably lower than the +1.2% in the article - so FSM joins Solomon Islands and Tonga doing considerable worse with a different methodology. As Nik suggests, at best, there is indeed a need for important caveats when making comparisons. There are huge challenges as highlighted by the article - PNG has had a major revision in its population estimates. Hopefully, the current census will shed some light on the actual population. Worth remembering that in 2018, PNG's National Statistics Office did a recalculation of PNG's GDP. For 2006, this led a to a 50% increase in measured GDP in 2006. As an economic historian, just makes analysis of economic performance through time difficult.

International comparisons of economic performance through time are difficult. This article appropriately focuses on Timor-Leste's non-oil economy performance. The same logic can also be applied to PNG's non-resource economy, as once again, the resource sector is primarily foreign-owned with the primary impacts coming through resource revenues, which are captured in non-resource GDP anyway. The Purchasing Power Parity calculations are also vexed, especially for economies with large resource sectors. My preference when trying to measure changes in living standards is to look at real disposable household incomes - my interpretation of the outcomes of the 2009 Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.” For PNG, this is best done by taking nominal growth in non-resource GDP, discounting by the Consumer Price Index, and dividing by population growth. Over this four-year period, PNG's non-resource economy grew by 39.8%, inflation grew by 18%, and population assumed to grow by 11.6% (using the 2020 IMF base and growing by 3% a year). The overall result was an improvement in living standards in PNG of 6.2% over this period - an average of 1.5%. When using the same methodology for other countries above (although I could not see FSM in the WEO database I downloaded), the average annual rates were as follows: Palau -6.4%, Solomon Islands -4.4%, Timor-Leste -3.8% (based on the article, and as local currency GDP was used, this is probably non-oil), Vanuatu -3.8%, Samoa -3.3%, Tonga -2.3%, Tuvalu -1.5%, Fiji -0.3%, Kiribati +1.4%, PNG +1.5%, Nauru +1.7% and RMI +1.7%. Some quite significant variations, with Solomon Islands and Tonga doing considerably worse, and PNG and RMI doing considerably better. I repeat the opening sentence.

Well done Sharon and Stephen. This is lazy from the IMF and we have seen this repeatedly - even their own AIV reports for most countries in the Pacific are now flawed and that has deep implications for economic analysis and policy in the region. Just one example of how this permeates - in your own blog, you continue to repeat the nonsense about tourism being a major economic factor for countries like Vanuatu and Samoa - absolute nonsense. The economic facts have never shown this. The actual GDP rates for these countries are out now and again show an overly pessimistic analysis from the IMF during this period - despite many revisions throughout the period -which are then parroted by the WB and ADB and subsequently filter through to all of the reports of the development partners. So, well done on calling it out - but will it have any impact on institutions like PFTAC - it remains to be seen but the Pacific needs better service in terms of economic analysis, now more than ever and the IMF's need to be held to account for their poor economic coverage of the region.

Great insights from the survey. It was stated that the PAS Vanuatu "closes a data gap" in the country, though I don't see references in the write up on specific indicators reported from the survey that inform national policy objectives or even SDGs for that matter. Where was the national demand for this survey, given that a national partner is not listed, and in what ways were ni-Vanuatu engaged in deciding what information was to be collected?

I'm interested but how would I get registered

I am currently in PNG, how can I apply for this?