Between 2012 to 2021, the National Capital District (NCD) of Papua New Guinea (PNG) saw numerous forceful evictions of citizens living in its many informal settlements, including some who had lived in these communities for more than 30 years. Some of these evictions involved state land...

This paper assesses the labour market impact of the Papua New Guinea (PNG) LNG project – the largest resource project ever completed in PNG. It discusses employment during the construction phase from 2010 to 2014 and the subsequent production phase. While national employment figures in the...

Multiple regressions are used to assess the relative significance of a number of political and social variables that might be associated with the likelihood of sitting MPs retaining or losing their seats in the 85 partially rural open electorates of Papua New Guinea (PNG). The tests reveal that...

This paper draws on data from the new Samoa Election Results database to highlight salient features and trends in Samoa’s electoral history. It reports on results for all national general elections since independence. It looks at votes and voter turnout, candidate numbers, winning candidate...

In May 2019, the Minister for Lands convened a National Land Summit in Port Moresby to review the implementation of the National Land Development Program over the course of the past decade. Much of the discussion at this meeting was concerned with the incorporation of customary land groups 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...

We study the impacts of a comprehensive financial inclusion program in a particularly remote, insecure and low-trust setting, lacking bridging institutions to facilitate sustained interventions. We evaluate this program in Wewak district in northwest Papua New Guinea, by randomly assigning...

The case of Papua New Guinea (PNG) shows the difficulty of forging a national identity and creating effective state institutions. State weakness and societal fragmentation are dominant. The archipelago nature of the country has had a dominant role in the latter. Politics in this context shows a...

This paper draws on the Papua New Guinea Election Results Database alongside other data to study the 2017 General Election in Papua New Guinea. The paper shows that the 2017 elections suffered significant problems, even by the standards of other countries of similar levels of development....

The Papua New Guinea (PNG) government and international donors have spent millions of kina trying to improve governance in the country’s bureaucracy. Despite these efforts, there are few indicators of success: many consider PNG’s public service to be rife with corruption. However, narratives...