Fiji is in the midst of a consultation process for a new Constitution on which General Elections are scheduled to be held in 2014. The new Constitution is going to be the fourth one for Fiji. During the first decade of independence, Fiji's economy grew at a rate of more than 5% per annum....

Steve Pollard, known in the Pacific as a government employee, researcher, consultant, and donor staffer, recently retired from the ADB. He has almost 30 years' experience working toward the interests of better policy for better livelihoods in the Pacific, almost 40 years' experience in...

Pacific Island Countries (PICs) are already experiencing the adverse impact of climate change yet often lack (human and financial) resources to meet the challenges of changing climatic conditions. This paper examines adaptation aid committed to recipient countries in the Pacific between 2010 and...

On average, appraisals find aid projects to be less effective in the Pacific than elsewhere in the developing world. In this study, we use a new multi-donor data set to study why aid projects are less effective in the region. We find the clearest impediments to effectiveness in the Pacific are...

This paper measures the extent to which both donor finance and resource revenues have contributed to higher rates of expenditure in key development sectors of the PNG economy-social services (including health and education) and infrastructure, between 1975 and 2010. Estimated elasticities are...

Recent theorizing on corruption is split between two approaches: corruption is described as a collective action or principal-agent problem. Insights from political science and geography suggest that these theories are not as bifurcated as some of the literature indicates, as their explanatory...

Papua New Guinea's (PNG) resource boom has come to an end. Theory suggests that the real exchange rate (RER) should subsequently depreciate in order to restore internal and external balance. In practice, however, the imposition of foreign exchange controls has led to a large backlog in foreign...

Why is it that Papua New Guinea, a country of nearly nine million people – 3.2 million of whom are aged 20 to 45 years of age, have so few workers able to access high-paying jobs in its near neighbours? In relation to opportunities for low-skilled, temporary work, Papua New Guinea in 2017-18...

Previous studies have mostly focused on the relationship between macroeconomic shocks and trade balance adjustments of resource-rich countries while largely overlooked countries with trade composition of high resource-export and strong import-dependence such as Papua New Guinea. Utilising a...

This paper makes use of data from the Papua New Guinea Election Results Database. It draws on an exercise in which we standardised the spelling of candidate names to allow for intertemporal analysis. Our central research questions included: whether the share of more experienced MPs in Papua New...