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You're right Robin - it is more complicated and the published material is a bit unclear on this. The 2013 spreadsheet says it weights the migration score using "poverty rates from aid component" but is not clear whether this means the "aid selectivity" weighting which includes a good governance factor. The student score appears to largely ignore income groups and count all non-CDI countries the same. I agree we wouldn't want to weight migration from Estonia the same as that from Tonga but I am a bit confused by your example. For me the reason for giving greater weight to Tongan immigration is because Tonga's per capita income is just one fifth that of Estonia's. I don't think that Tonga's proximity to Australia or small size is so relevant in a global commitment to development index.

Dear Marcus, I am looking for urban development experts with experience in Honiara and landed on your very informative blog post. I am a Project Manager at the Affordable Housing Institute, and we're putting together a team for an ADB tender on Urban Infrastructure and Planning in Honiara. I would love to tell you more about the Terms of Reference of the project, and to inquire whether we might collaborate together. I look forward to your response. Thanks so much for your time. I can be reached at any of the following emails: dhuynh@affordablehousinginstitute.org; dhuynh.ahi@gmail.com; duongh@wharton.upenn.edu

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Thanks for your comments, Elizabeth and Amanda. It would also be interesting to see how the ABC, through its online service, reports on PNG issues as compared to Australian newsprint media. If ABC reporting is balanced, as suggested in Amanda's journal article, then it might be a useful benchmark.

Garth -- I decided to look at other components of the migration policy sub-index separately, in another post to come, but I did recently investigate your point above. According to the fine print, 'countries are more rewarded for accepting migrants from poor countries, rather than relatively rich countries'. That's from the 2015 assessment. Going back to 2013, the technical paper by David Roodman (to which there's a link in the post) says that gross immigrant inflows are 'weighted by poverty discount of sending countries, using multipliers ...Thus, immigration from Haiti is discounted less than that from Estonia'. It's not clear, even from the 2013 spreadsheet, how the multipliers actually work. And once you start weighting, things get tricky. For example, many small island states are upper middle-income, but surely we wouldn't want to weight migration from Estonia the same as migration from Tonga.

Thank you for this interesting post Anthony. I've also had the chance to undertake research on the Australian media's coverage of Papua New Guinea. In the research I was engaged in, with others, we focused on the broadcast media. We watched many hours and hours of TV news bulletins, listened to radio bulletins and included some online coverage too. We found that apart from the ABC's regular and balanced coverage, there is very little mention of PNG on Australian airwaves. A journal article on this research is available <a href="http://eprints.qut.edu.au/17566/" rel="nofollow">here</a>. Nonetheless, that research was on coverage in 2008. It would be quite interesting to study the Australian broadcast media coverage again, to see if anything has changed. Thanks again for the post, Amanda. 🙂

Thank you, Rod. It is an excellent question. Our discussion focused on aid in general. From my experience, Australian aid can inform the Brussels conference in two areas: type of aid being provided and alignment with Afghanistan priorities. In these areas, the Australian aid was relatively more efficient. Re Uruzgan the prospects are not very encouraging. A sharp decline in assistance in part undermined the transition in that province. If interested, <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Foreign_Affairs_Defence_and_Trade/Completed_inquiries/2010-13/afghanistan/report/index" rel="nofollow">here is the link</a> for the Senate inquiry on Australian overseas development program for Afghanistan. Some of the issues discussed are still relevant.

I think there might be an additional issue in the CDI methodology Robin that inflates Australia's development contribution via migration. It appears that several of the CDI components appear to treat all DAC recipient countries the same whether they are low income or upper middle income. For example with the Migration component, in Australia's case only one of the top ten sources of migrants and of foreign students is a low income country (Nepal), and many of the rest are upper middle income countries, yet it appears migrants and students from both these types of countries are given the same weighting. (https://www.border.gov.au/about/reports-publications/research-statistics/statistics/live-in-australia/migration-programme/trends-2013-14).

Thank you proff, I think all this risk PNG is taking is basically driven by one men's greed motivated by political agendas. It is apparent that most decisions made by our so-called leaders are derived from the notion self lust rather than the good of all, I hope the PM and all the MPs behind the wheels have a destination in mind for PNG.

What are some of the Solomon islands government regulations and policies that deals with the environmental problem caused by the Gold ridge mining?

One problem is also that voluntourism companies have close connections to review and advertising platforms which make it hard to find a good program <a href="http://www.responsible-volunteering.com/?p=394" rel="nofollow">based on reviews</a>. We have written a series with absolutely new findings and industry insights about this problem. You can follow us on our <a href="https://www.facebook.com/responsiblevolunteering" rel="nofollow">Facebook page</a> for more updates on voluntourism.

The TFF is a very good educational development policy instrument to achieve universal education plus other associated objectives in PNG. However, the many undesirable issues associated with TFF point out the need to strengthen the accountability aspect of it. And Provincial Education Board (PEB) is already a key partner in the system, so its isolation is a bad precedent. Interestingly the already ever-know-it-all politicians are dipping their finger of greed into this policy. For instance, now that the 2017 National Election in around the corner, few shortsighted and selfish politicians are already awarding the TFF infrastructural components to their cronies objectively to steal through kickbacks.. How sad to have legislators (Law Makers) who are at the same time criminals? This is wisdom in limbo.