Pacific Island Countries (PICs) are experiencing a rapid urban transition in the context of intensifying climate and disaster risks. Responding to these challenges requires more than incremental action. The Livable Pacific Cities and Towns report sets out a strategic framework for resilient...

The operation has been screened for climate and disaster risks and has been found to be highly exposed while risks to the operation's activities are moderate. Climate change is profoundly impacting the health of Pacific Islanders, particularly the large portion of the population with...

Solomon Islands faces the immediate fiscal challenges of rebuilding cash reserves, improving the quality of public spending, and imposing fiscal discipline on domestic borrowing. To address these challenges while financing necessary investments, it is an urgent priority to improve the...

Solomon Islands faces challenges in fiscal data governance despite reforms. While the Public Financial Management Act (PFMA) of 2013 aimed to enhance transparency, inconsistent implementation and resource constraints persist. This paper highlights key issues and recommendations, including...

This paper investigates the short- and medium-term economic impacts of natural disasters, focusing on Pacific Island Countries (PICs) and using global high-frequency nightlight data in addition to macroeconomic data. In this paper, we identify significant short-term effects on growth following...

We examine growth strategies for the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) focusing on the role of tourism and diversification. First, we quantify the contribution of tourism to growth using panel regressions and we compute how much additional tourism would be needed for PICs to sustain comparators'...

This report attempts to provide a snapshot of the living standards of the population from multidimensional poverty perspectives and assess the progress made between 2009 and 2019. Given the outdated official monetary poverty data in the 2012/13 Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES),...

The Solomon Islands government plays key roles in the health sector, as a funder, regulator, and provider of nearly all health services. Health services are funded, managed, and delivered by the Ministry of Health and Medical Services (MHMS). The MHMS also allocates resources (such as funding,...

Farewell to Single-Use Plastics in the Pacific is a World Bank-led series of analytics aimed at informing national and regional decision-making, policy formulation, and investment requirements focused on decreasing plastic imports, consumption, and plastic waste, and, consequently, on reducing...

Solomon Islands has weathered the shocks of civil unrest, pandemic, and commodity price hikes, and achieved the milestones of hosting the Pacific Games in late 2023 and conducting peaceful general elections in April 2024. These achievements have raised the country's profile and strengthened...

Economic output and livelihoods in Pacific Island economies (PIEs) rely greatly on ocean-related sectors and products, known as the "Blue Economy". Yet, marine ecosystems are under mounting pressure of climate change and human degradation, exposing PIEs to very large risks, while they have only...

This report provides an overview of the assistance provided by the IMF to the Central Bank of Solomon Islands on enhancing its risk management in line with international best practices for central banks

The departmental paper, "Rise of Digital Money: Implications for Pacific Island Countries," delves into the fast-evolving landscape of digital money in a diverse region of extremes in size, remoteness and dispersion, highlighting its significant macroeconomic and financial consequences. It...

When parents migrate from home to another place and leave their children behind, it can have a large influence on their children. This study explores the relationship between parental migration and the learning outcomes of left-behind children aged 7-14 in Pacific Island economies, particularly...

Pacific developing member countries (DMCs) depend heavily on international tourism, which can promote merchandise exports by reducing trade costs. This paper empirically analyzes tourist inflows as a determinant of merchandise exports for Pacific DMCs by deploying a gravity model technique....

The fourth review of the trade policies and practices of the Solomon Islands takes place on 11 and 13 December 2024. The basis for the review is a report by the WTO Secretariat and a report by the Government of the Solomon Islands.

We collect new data to document the long-run evolution of the firm size distribution in ten market-based economies in Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania, where we can obtain comprehensive coverage of the population of firms. Around the world, we observe prevalent increases in the...

This note provides a deep dive into the quality of nighttime lights (NTL) data for Pacific Island Countries (PICs). It explores their potential to generate and complement regional socio-economic statistics. NTL data has been widely used as a proxy of economic activity. It has been used to both...

Climate change poses an existential threat to many islands in the Pacific. Small island states in the regionare increasingly vulnerable to extreme rainfall events, cyclones, changes in ocean circulation, and risingsea level. Climate data is a critical resource to help development actors prepare...

The systematic country diagnostic (SCD) covers a group of nine small Pacific Island countries (PIC-9) - Kiribati, Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. The document updates the previous SCD, completed in 2016, and assesses the...

The paper probes the sector-wise presence of volatility persistence, herding behavior and corresponding implications on investors and policymakers in the Oceania region both in Pre-COVID & Post-COVID era. The inspection is based on seven identical sectors from both Australia and New Zealand...

This Selected Issues paper on Solomon Island discusses big data and high frequency surveillance for Pacific Islands countries (PICs). Big data can be used to fill data gaps for PICs and the IMF can serve as a capacity-building and innovation hub. The estimators computed based on AIS data have...

This 2023 Article IV Consultation highlights that the economy is recovering from multiple shocks in the past three years, but the recovery is still fragile in the Solomon Islands. Near-term fiscal policy should focus on prudent execution of the 2023 budget, followed by rebuilding of the...

Over the two decades preceding the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, tourism became one of the most important drivers of economic growth across the Pacific. The COVID-19 crisis had a devastating impact on tourism activity in the Pacific, with severe and potentially durable economic...

This study investigates the patterns of global value chain (GVC) participation of Pacific island countries (PICs) at the country, industry, and firm levels, utilizing UNCTAD-Eora GVC data (1999-2018) and the World Bank's Enterprise Survey data (2009 and 2015). It also uses the survey data to...