Comments

Thanks Tess for your thoughtful comment. There will always be more demands for health care than there are resources, so in that sense there is a conflict. However I think the more important point for Pacific Islands is that with limited resources ("fiscal space") Governments have to use their resources in the most effective and equitable way. The report shows that some governments in the Pacific allocate quite large shares of their scarce resources to very expensive, and not very effective, "curative" care, often in hospitals where costs are higher. The argument I am making in the report is that reallocating scarce resources to primary and secondary prevention at earlier stages in the diseases will be a more cost-effective approach than end stage "curative" care, and improve public health more broadly. Being more affordable, primary and secondary prevention will also be able to treat more people as well. But even then, there will always still be budgetary and other constraints (eg availability of skilled health workers) to address needs.

Thanks for this post Ian, it raises some very important points. However, I can't help feeling that within your 3 points above, the third is largely contradicted by the second. Yes there are significant financial and economic benefits to focusing on primary and secondary interventions to manage risk factors but if the 'fiscal space' really is that limited then is this actually achievable?

Hi Stephen, Thought your response was worth a quick reply though a chat over a coffee might be more effective. The most evident error in your blog, which I thought was clear even from my rushed response, is that Australians need not be involved in all ACIAR funded projects. And I am not sure how a competitive process would ensure the involvement of the limited best developing country researchers as ACIAR projects have. On the benefits question, which I said flow automatically from the collaborative model, recently taken up in AusAID's recent AIP Program, this is appearing in the UK aid debate at the moment. The position to not cut aid whilst domestic programs are being cut is being defended on the grounds that such aid delivers the socio-economic benefits to the UK that ACIAR requires to be estimated ex ante in its projects for all countries and formally measured by independent assessors ex post. Best regards Ray

While I congratulate the PM and his Government, I want to post this comment regarding the 2013 Budget. The budget still does not address the needs and aspirations of ordinary Papua New Guineans today. About 75 per cent of it is based on assumptions and not deducted facts and figures due to several reasons. One of these is that its intial framing never considered the principle of putting the last first which is only possible through a bottom up planning and participatory budgeting approach. I think the government has not been placing value on data and information.

Thanks John for this post. I think this topic is an important one not only for PNG but also for other Pacific island countries. I think one of the most significant hurdles to supporting informal economic activity is a lack of information, by its very nature it is difficult to map and quantify. Some countries (e.g. Solomon Islands) are now taking steps to include questions in their Household Income & Expenditure Surveys which attempt to capture some of this information which is one step in informing policy by governments and development partners.

Thanks for your comment, Ray, but I must say that I couldn't find the errors you identified, and nor do I think we wrote from a narrow (let alone an AusAID) perspective. Unfortunately, you make an error by saying we suggest "the mutual benefits rationale" is important "over" development. What we say is that ACIAR adopts a mutual benefits rationale (that projects should benefit both the developing country and Australia). It does this so often and so pervasively that I thought it was in its legislation. It isn't. ACIAR is the only part of the aid program required to justify its spending in part in terms of benefits of commercial benefits to Australia. That's unfortunate. Downer dropped the commercial objective back in 1996. ACIAR should catch up with the rest of the aid program. This is not to say that some projects won't have commercial benefits. But it shouldn't be the objective. Second, I take it you think ACIAR should continue to require the involvement of Australian researchers in all its programs. Again, the rest of the aid program has made, not complete, but considerable progress in terms of untying over the last 15 years. As we say, there are good arguments for continuing to link to Australian researchers. And there are certainly good arguments for encouraging collaborative approaches, as you show. But there are also good arguments for, as we put it, "encouraging ACIAR to seek out the best researchers wherever they are, rather than the best Australian researchers. For example, ACIAR might open a competitive funding window which would be available to researchers worldwide." I'm surprised you implicitly dismiss this argument without considering it directly. Think of AusAID's ADRA: the best Australians compete against the best from other countries for the Australian development research dollar. As you have pointed out, there are lots of good Australian agricultural economists, and there are no doubt many good Australian agricultural scientists as well. They should do well in a competitive process. In summary, requiring ACIAR projects to provide commercial benefits and tying all projects to the involvement of Australian researchers are unfortunate, and one might say narrowing, or even protectionist, features of ACIAR's work. That was the argument of our submission, and I don’t see anything in your response which convinces me that we were wrong. None of this is to argue that ACIAR does not do good work, or that AusAID is somehow better. I have more than once argued for more funding for ACIAR. But the aim of the Farmer Review is to look at what can be improved, and that was the focus of our submission and post. Thanks again for your response. I'd be interested to hear what others think. Stephen.

Gulf Province I am sad to say is like the rest of the Papua New Guinean Provinces, neglected and starved of money and resources,not to mention the women and men who can work to turn the Provinces around.It seems every body has left the Provinces for better lives for themselves and their families.We cannot blame them because they had to do what seems right for themselves. What saddens me is that the Provinces were given more then enough monies(over 30 years) but it is the governors (small g not capital G) who obviously misused all the money hence PNG with its Districts and Sub Districts have all 'gone to the dogs'. Port Moresby has had to accommodate all the human beings from all these disfunctional and neglected districts and sub districts not to mention people from the many villages all over Papua New Guinea. I can only see PNG becoming another African country,the rich becoming richer on the backs of the millions of rural Papua New Guineans.It makes me so angry,when I know that there is enough money to start a come back to good and better living standards for the 30 years of misuse of all the millions - tens of millions and hundreds of millions and millions upon millions into billions. It is all needless, all this suffering something has to be done, God help us Gulf Karus- Papua New Guineans !!!

Have you seen any relationship between maturity of development and PEFA scores? My anecdotal observation is that there are many mid-developed small countries (i.e. in the Caribbean) that have not been subject to significant donor pressure for governance reform. On the other hand, smaller countries that have had donor intervention can leverage advantages in PFM reform from being small: adopt international standards like IPSAS & GFS, operate on a single information system to achieve timliness & completeness of reports and transparency. Financial controls and predictability of revenue and expenditures can be managed more easily in smaller countries. The other challenge in small countries is that the government is often providing the traditional national, regional and municipal functions.

The USP website may well be vastly better than the one not maintained by UPNG but as anyone with any meaningful contact with USP systems will tell you, there is very little to crow about otherwise. And with the 'owning' countries increasingly looking to establish their own tertiary institutions (Fiji has several, Samoa has one, Solomon Islands appears to have made a start and it has been mentioned in Vanuatu) it is only to be expected that their commitment both financial and political to the regional university will wane rather than wax.

An interesting post but written I feel from a narrow AusAID perspective and with errors. I was a bit confused by the suggested importance of the mutual benefits rationale over development ones in ACIAR dealings that was mentioned in the summary as I have never found this the case. Your stated estimate that only 10% of the benefits are Australian (which presumably would not change with a revision of the 50:1 rate of return which new research estimates at around a respectable 30:1) would suggest developing countries benefits dominate. It is hard to imagine how a standard ACIAR project would not deliver some mutual benefits given the underlying characteristics, especially the collaborative model which, unlike some other agencies, ensures the project is not made up completely of Australian consultants flying into a developing country and out with a report reflecting little collaboration with local researchers. The collaborative model of ensures the direct involvement of developing country research institutions and that all the researchers are not Australian. Often the Commissioned agency is one of the expensive CGIAR centres mentioned with any Australian involvement a minor component. The collaborating developing country institutions are free to involve non-Australian expertise from their funds and many have, along with other research agencies, NGOs, and private companies. Some of the developing country researchers involved have been amongst the world’s best and some have end up as government Ministers, or Chief Economists or candidates for heading up international agencies. The Australian collaborating institutions often involve foreign students studying for Australian PhDs within the project as part of the capacity building objective; another mutual benefit that provides greater incentives for a successful project which is not a bad thing as Adam Smith would have said. And what is wrong with many Australian researchers in this area? Australians have punched above their weight in the administration of international agencies despite quotas and in the more recognised work of the professional journals. Many of the people concerned have had connections with the ANU and the Crawford School in its various guises like Sir John Crawford, Ross Garnaut, Ron Duncan, Stuart Harris, Kym Anderson, John Freebairn and Peter Warr to name a few. This relatively high representation reflects what might be expected of a country with a high comparative advantage in agriculture and large agricultural-related institutions, including those involved in research such ABARES, parts CSIRO and the PC, and equivalent state agencies. Finally, all ACIAR project proposals have more or less from the outset included an ex ante impact assessment and many completed projects undergo a formal ex post one, the benefits of which in terms justifying its existence have been well understood long before some other agencies.

Hi Graham, A very interesting article and some really relevant aspects about PNG you raise from the ODI Report. At the risk of being controversial, it seems that ol’ George Santayana was right on the money when he observed; ‘Those that turn their back on history are doomed to repeat it.” You only have to look at nations elsewhere that had to coalesce from various disparate origins and become a unified nation in order to advance. Until PNG becomes a unified nation, there are too many conflicting influences and influencers pushing and pulling the country’s priorities and resources apart. Australia is one of the few countries that didn’t have a civil war before becoming unified (to some extent anyway I grant you depending on which state side you barrack for). It took two wars and a defeat like Gallipoli to turn us into a semi unified nation. Turn back the clock and look at England after the Norman conquest or Europe in the Middle Ages. Italy needed a Garibaldi to effect unification and then hand his conquest over to a civilian authority without succumbing to the lure and glory of becoming a dictator when he had the power and opportunity. PNG has never had enough time to evolve into anything more than a fragmented and artificially cobbled together entity due to political connivance and lack of understanding by those on both sides of the Torres Strait and in those in the UN who pushed Independence on the people before they were fully prepared. No wonder that there are so many parallels on the former colonies in Africa. Perhaps PNG does need a totally different form of government to the Westminster system that clearly does not work in a PNG context. Mind you, some would observe it may not be working in many other countries as well. Recently, two ANU academics wrote about what did work in PNG (see <a href="http://www.anu.edu.au/fellows/jbraithwaite/_documents/Articles/Colonial_Kiap.pdf" rel="nofollow">here</a>) [pdf]. The notion of what clearly did work in rural PNG could well be work another look. It was only got rid of by those who did not know what they had and provided no other viable option.

I suspect this question is probably not the right one to ask. The question should not be what can donors do in governance in PNG. The real question is why do donors end up selecting governance modalities in PNG that have consistently been shown not to work, at least in terms of generating service delivery outcomes? Potential answers to this question quickly lead one to speculation on what really drives investment choices, what activities do managers (both PNG and donor) consider constitutes good governance, and why? What makes managers opt for the Henry Ford approach to choice? As in, "you can have any innovative governance model you like, as long as it is ends up being advisers and public financial management capacity building". Is it conceivable that maintaining good contacts in the centralised bureaucracy and enhancing donor abilities to assemble defensible budget numbers might actually be a donor preference over delivering on provincial service delivery objectives? Often the argument is mounted that boosting corporate and central functions inevitably leads to better service delivery, but there is really not much evidence to support that proposition. So how many donor investments and advisers actually work on specific service delivery vs how many work on boosting central or corporate policy functions? Why do we select the options that we do?