Comments

I would love to be one of the Kiribati women working in New Zealand.

Thanks Ryan, really useful! Apologies for the delay, I didn't get an email notification of replies. Yes that WB paper is excellent (and in fact cited in the blog), and yes would also be interested to look through the mine location dataset at some stage. Cheers.

Hi Raphael, apologies for the delay, really interesting points. On other Pacific countries, they don't really have oil/mining to any important degree - Fiji has a little, Sols does have high resource rents - but from forestry - so PNG is very much an outlier in its landmass size, population size and mining/oil dependence in the Pacific. On reserves, there are certainly many new resource projects in discussions, and a doubling of output at some time in the future seems possible - though as mentioned, this would put PNG at the level of Timor-Leste. Highlighting that future revenues are not likely to turn PNG into a Fiji or Mauritius or Malaysia or Azerbaijan. You're right that 2021 is somewhat of an outlier, however, at least for PNG its average resource rent as % of GDP for the last 20 years was around 20%, while in 2021 it was 27%, so it likely overstates the importance of resources in PNG historically. Though at the same time resources have been increasing in importance as a % of GDP in PNG in the last few years too.

A 30% minimum non zero income tax rate is too high. This can disincentivize work or formal employment, especially for the low- income earners.

I would like to be one of Kiribati women working overseas.

100% agree.

Thanks for sharing this important work, Rochelle

Indeed this is clear evaluation and and Government should look into the social factors that affect the education system in PNG

Terrific to have this summary. This kind of policy attention is much needed at this juncture: Pacific integration into regional connectedness/ opportunity has to be a real and substantive possibility.

Super interesting comparison, where we realise that, Gulf countries aside, Australia (and Russia!) are really "up there" in terms of resource revenues per capita. Would be interesting to look at: - comparison with other Pacific countries - comparison of reserves. Maybe PNG has a lot of them compared to resource rent? Also maybe looking at 2021 only skews the analysis, given how volatile resource prices have been since then.

The national goals and directive principles in the preamble inspires human integral development of equality and participation, the majority of PNG's population must equal participation in the formal economy. emphasis should be focus address the financial literacy and infrastructure connective. The people must formally connect to monetize economy to enhance living standard access and usage of financial services. Thats PNG's vision 2050

Great piece, Rohan. It's all pretty relative, and the definitions get muddy, with the rhetoric having strong implications, as you point out. The 90s work on this topic used the term abundance, but the indicator was typically the resources' share of exports (think Sachs and Warner), which of course, only measures export dependence. Then, that got split into point and diffuse resources, different types, etc. Then, people shifted to reserves (Norman was the original dataset on this), often put in per capita terms, as a measure of abundance, and termed the former dependence. The consensus then was that volatility was really the key, and it was in this era that the Natural Resource Charter emerged (now, NRGI I think), which I think then and to this day represents best practice in resource policy recommendations. The resource rents measure surfaced somewhere in between, although I was never a big fan, and where people had access (as the best geotagged data are commercial), the most popular and best data to use in empirical work became "discovery" shocks (see Rabah Arezki's work) and production levels (or taking the endowments as a given and just using price variation), which I think made more sense and allows for more credible measurement and research designs. In my first PhD chapter (the WD paper) I instead used mining share of GDP to pick up current mining dependence more specifically, but an interesting point raised in using reserves as well is that they're estimates and known, where the extent to which they are known is also endogenous as a function of exploration effort, tech, etc., which is in turn a clear function of institutions, see Cust et al JEEA). So, no matter which way you go, there are limitations and I guess it comes down to just being clear on what you are trying to measure. But this is a roundabout way of saying its nice to see your post, and this topic discussed more here. The WB team's recent work, which they presented in our UPNG seminar, on development trends observed using different rounds of different survey data, makes similar points and does some interesting comparisons to other "resource-rich" countries, if I recall correctly. It is an important grounding discussion to have. Relatedly, we (Kelly and I, with generous inputs from Colin F) put together a district-level dataset of mine locations with opening dates, if that can be of further use to you or anyone reading. Of course, research-ready subnational panel data does not really exist to link it to though.