Comments

Great article, thank you Sue. I and my team, Wantaim PNG, work in rural PNG. Working with local government partners in April 2020 we kicked off a province wide delivery of regular soap supplies and flyers with preventative measures. 12,000 households, 133,000 bars of soap. Being for the most part the only voice talking about COVID made it enormously challenging. The 8,000 vaccines from Australia is a welcome but small step. I despair about the likely uptake: how receptive can we expect folk to be when for the most part little info has reached them about COVID at all? I despair over the loss of the (ABC) short wave broadcast which was the platform to do that and so much more. It was a trusted (Australian!) voice reaching far into rural communities. Imagine. Thank you Sue for putting the case for more, so clearly.

Hi Joseph, Have you got any udpates on daily life in Moresby and PNG and how people are managing the rising cases on a social level? Thanks.

This is a very good question. It is difficult for us to control for other factors. Nonetheless, given the pronouncements about the expected impacts of the cable as it was being laid and then launched, we felt it was important to start this research. We will continue to monitor retail prices and any other relevant data that is available. Amanda

Thanks very much for the great and the marvellous job which has been done by our great grand chief Sir Michael Somare for the people of the independent state of Papua New Guinea.

Dear Rohan, Thank you for your comments. The Ethiopia analysis was done using a computable general equilibrium model designed to capture effects of policies and shocks across all economic sectors, factor markets (labor, capital...), households, etc. Our multi-market model analysis did not include these general equilibrium effects and we do not have immediate plans for a CGE analysis, in large part due to data limitations. General equilibrium results for PNG would likely vary considerably from those for Ethiopia, though, because of the very large role of the oil, natural gas and large farm agricultural export sectors in PNG's foreign exchange earnings and the overall economy. Modeling the behavior of these sectors and the responses of the PNG government will be crucial to the simulation results.

A correction to the post of 19 March: Mr D. Brian King continues as the Barrick Australia arbitrator. Vailala

Hello Emily, Xinshen, Paul and Peixun. This is a fascinating and important piece of research, even if somewhat sobering in light of COVID19. As you probably know, PNG has been experiencing foreign exchange rationing for the last 6 years or so. I am wondering in a PNG situation whether the distributional effects of an exchange rate devaluation would be similar to that of one of your co-author's papers [https://www.ifpri.org/publication/economic-implications-foreign-exchange-rationing-ethiopia-0] in Ethiopia - which found that the removal of rationing and subsequent devaluation would lead to an increase in real incomes for the urban poor of around 4%. Can the data you collected in this research be used to model a similar simulation on the distributional effects of removing FX rationing/creating convertibility in FX markets on incomes and calorie intake? do you have any plans to do this?

As citizen of Somaliland I feel proud of what the government did over 30 years of its existence. It is much better than many African-recognised countries in terms of peace building, economic boom and good governance.

Well written and pragmatic article. Good job and best of luck with your work!

Thanks Stephen for your response, I do enjoy reading the articles and the analysis provided by all the contributors to the Blog. I am sorry for using the harsher work of "failure" but I was drawing this from when I read that the key initiatives of the Forum (the Pacific Plan and the Framework for Pacific Regionalism) had failed. If this is so, then the whole raison d'etre of the Forum and its Secretariat have failed as they are not able to provide their members with the environment to progress the Leaders' vision for the Forum. We should also acknowledge that the region's narrative changes and has to be updated while a 2050 focus might be longer than some might suggest it is a valuable process for the countries and partners. One other matter, if Forum membership is providing so little value for the members then the decision on who held the position of Secretary-General would mean virtually nothing, hence, the position of the Micronesian countries would then not make any sense. So I think this recent round for the SG showed that there is still a lot of interest in the leadership that is shaping the future of the Forum and its Secretariat.

Thanks Grant, this is the most valuable research. Just one suggestion, you need to indicate what type of corruption you are talking about. Corruption that extracts relatively small bribes from the citizens is very common everywhere where the state is weak, choatic and dysfunctional (except for collecting bribes). It is often however understood by the victims-citizens, who give this practice innocent sounding names, lunch-moni or tea money. For PNG however an equally or possibly more important form of corruption is the grand corruption where money is directly taken from the state or even from the central bank and directly transferred to other, private accounts. Similarly, the corruption with mining licenses and kick-backs on selling of state assets by a few well-connected individuals involves huge sums of money, as we recently read in the Guardian https://bit.ly/pngrexpaki. I will be writing you to see how we can put some of this research together and paint a complete picture. Corruptology is on the rise! 🙂

Congratulations to the authors of this interesting piece. Tracking and comparing regular price data on internet costs is an excellent approach. One question: Are you sure you will be able to attribute any eventual cost decreases (supposing they occur) to the Coral Sea Cable as opposed to any other factors?