Comments

Thanks Jenny for providing this article which is more of an insight to real life process experienced by the so called West Papuan Brothers/Sisters in PNG. The daily life experiences they have in Port Moresby are exactly the same for PNGans migrants moving from rural villages to towns and cities. Everyday they all struggle to live a life on the fringes of towns and cities while competing to access public amenities like health care and schools. So the refugees lived at Rainbow is much the same for PNG migrants moving into towns and cities. Any form of privileges or special treatment provided by PNG government to our brothers and sisters from West Papua in PNG soil will flare up into political vendetta between PNG and Indonesia and it will have its consequences. However, there should be a leeway some where to start with to support our fellow brothers and sisters who lived at places like Rainbow in Port Moresby, apart from citizenship and changing immigration status.

Des What do you mean poorly written article. What Nicholas has written is clearly a descriptive understanding of the whole SME concept, policy and how it should work for PNG context. It seems you lack understanding whilst working in the SME program. It describes how SME ideology works in real world while you seem to be theoretical and focusing on assumptions which will not work for PNG, bulk of the population. We have already seen evidences of what was described in PNG while you are in the assumption. Do you like PNGans to make bilums, do poultry or piggery or run PMVs with SME loans?? SME should do better for PNGans under the policy then these mere high risky chores. You may as well would like to take the useful comments offered by Nicholas for your management purpose and better policy direction. Thanks Nicholas for the descriptive analysis.

Thanks Win for the article, which I think is well put. I note the contributions from Des, Terry and Koima, and that all disagree with the basic point of your argument- that an SME policy for PNG is a very good idea, but that the strong protectionist bias of the current policy is bad. I think the key issue here is governance. In the hands of a state with underlying functional governance and developmental will (e.g. postwar Japan, Taiwan, and the other East Asian tigers), putting industrial policy / aka protectionism in the hands of state bureaucrats and the political apparatus largely worked, because the state largesse and favours that were distributed were done so on the basis of shared public notions of the universalist public good. History shows that when the same discretion is applied in a weak state with dysfunctional governance and a weak sense of the notion of the public good, and weak notions of noblesse oblige amongst its elite, the favours of protectionism are bestowed on members of elite crony networks. The end result in the latter is economic stagnation and the private enrichment and strengthening of the elite based on state privilege, and further marginalisation of the politically weak (AKA "the poor"). Most of early post-colonial Africa and some Latin American countries typify examples of the latter. In such circumstances, universally bestowed and accessible market enablers such as "essential infrastructural services like better roads and bridges, electricity and telecommunication", are far more likely to trigger changes in the political economy that will result in the rise of a genuine indigenous bourgeois, than poorly targeted protectionism.

Thanks Jenny. Just as an interesting aside, I visited an Indonesian village south-east of Merauke a few years ago and was surprised to find a whole bunch of English-speaking villagers there. They were West Papuans who had recently returned to West Papua after fleeing to PNG over a decade before. Economically, they didn't seem better or worse off than any of the non-English speakers in that village. I guess some West Papuan refugees feel comfortable enough to return to West Papua. Others, for political or other reasons, don't.

Siem and Thomas -- Many thanks for responding to the post. I've had a direct message from somebody at D-Portal along similar lines. I think we all agree that not enough resources are currently being allocated to the development of tools for manipulating and presenting IATI data, including data drawn from multiple donors for the purposes of comparison. I think we also agree that such resources should come from the official sector, since such tools are public goods. I hope it is clear that my aim in this post was to reinforce exactly these points, even where discussing the limitations of existing tools. There seems to be a real gap here, and it's my view that the OECD's Development Assistance Committee should be looking to fill it. Siem -- A quick further response on your two specific points. First, it is certainly clear now that D-Portal and the IATI Studio should not be directly compared; my point, as noted, was that from a distance, based on the information available last year, one might have assumed that the IATI Studio suite would include something like a 'souped up' D-Portal. And second, I now see that one has to choose both 'Use native currency' and 'Convert all values to AUD' for the chart builder to do what I wanted it to do, but I would still assert that this is confusing given that the former choice would seem to entail the latter! A very minor quibble, of course.

Poorly written article.The author fails to compare apples with apples here. He didn't state that the SME was protectionist only toward small and medium enterprises. These are the grassroots businesses that provide much of the income for the bulk of our population, and very much need to be protected in the face of increasing competition from foreigners putting them out of business. In the absence of a State social welfare system, a protectionist small business policy is an urgent need to our people. This article implies that the policy intends to shut the door to all foreign investment which is untrue. We welcome large foreign investors for the for the spinoff business opportunities they create for local SMEs.

Win, on one hand you criticise selective protectionism but on the other hand you acknowledge the economic rise of Malaysia, Taiwan, and Japan. Wasn't their rise partly because of selective protectionism while certain industries were in their infancy (then opening them to competition after they became stronger)? Shouldn't this be more a debate about WHICH sectors still need foreign investment and foreign skills (meaning profits shipped off-shore) and WHICH sectors require protection?

I agree with you and I think it's time the government make it mandatory for any foreign business intent on doing business in PNG to have a 50 percent partnership with local businesses so that local businesses can benefit from their comparative advantages such as skills, technology, finance and networks to prosper and at the the same time be open to potentially enter other foreign markets themselves through these partnerships.

Excellent ideas, Ash. Also, I can't help but feel that a PokemonGo-inspired effort is in order ('SDGs: gotta meet 'em all!') 🙂

Such programs are termed as sustainable academic development in which impact information are disseminated through learning and its benefits are indeed unspeakable!

It is easy to criticise efforts that are in an early stage, like the IATI Studio or D-Portal, but as Siem correctly points out there is very limited funding available for this type of work. Building a comprehensive data solution that allows us to compare IATI data from different countries and organisations effectively is actually a fairly substantial task. An even bigger task is actually to get all the organisations and governments to actually report meaningful IATI data. Something which you correctly point out is slow in forthcoming. The organisations which are working on these type of data systems, including the one I am working with, Akvo Foundation, have been talking to quite a few funders and UN organisations about this. But there is little coordinated effort to create a source of funding where systems like this could be supported. Siem and his team is doing really good work with limited resources. I know this, having worked quite a lot with them early on. What the governments and organisations who have committed to publishing IATI data should do, is get together and provide funding for efforts like IATI Studio, d-portal and others, so we can get from working with data as a nice concept to actually drawing the benefits from the data. Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson Co-director, Akvo Foundation

Thanks. Do you think the Kina will appreciate against the US Dollars and Japanese Yen this year?