DP45 Informality’s elusive thread: policy debates in late colonial Port Moresby

Hart’s informality was an elusive thread in the fabric of Port Moresby, capital and principal urban centre of Papua New Guinea (PNG) during the late colonial period, 1945-75. Commencing in the late period of preparation for Independence, a genuine PNG voice emerged in the colonial legislature and the Pangu party took power on the eve of self-government. A consultant team, the Faber Mission of 1972, was tasked to recommend policies for an independent PNG. Keith Hart, originator of the idea of the ‘urban informal sector’, was a team member. Hart found that economic informality, while emerging in rural areas, was largely absent from PNG towns and his account of the experience is central to this paper. The Faber Report placed informality at the heart of its strategies for development and this was adopted enthusiastically by the new government. The paper describes informality as being closely linked with another issue, the need for a modern regulatory framework for formal employment. This required efforts to break a ‘Gordian knot’, originating in the nexus between retarded urbanism, archaic processes of wage determination and low labour productivity. The paper deals with the ideological ferment surrounding these events and the brief and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to ‘formalize the informal’. It examines the intellectual precursors of informality in PNG, the slender evidence for its existence in 1970s Port Moresby and the cultural and economic reasons for this situation. It ventures beyond the colonial period to provide a brief afterword concerning the longer-run consequences of a wages shock which occurred between 1972 and 1975.