Comments

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.

Thank you Michael. You're right - it would be great to get it published, but until then, there's always the thesis (first link in the blog), and the other linked articles and blogs. Regards, Pete

Thank you Derek. Indeed, bribery and quality certainly came up in my research. However, these along with many other details which are reasonably well understood, were not the focus of this short blog, or my presentation. Instead I sort to draw attention to less well-known facts, noting that there is greater detail in the articles linked to the blog (including the thesis itself if you're particularly interested). Regards, Pete

No doubt the audiences would have appreciated the opportunity to respond to your findings. It would be great to see this comprehensive research in a monograph Pete!