It is now more than a decade since Ray Watters and I published the first of a series of papers discussing the findings of our 1984 research project into New Zealand policies toward the Pacific Islands (Bertram and Watters 1984, 1985, 1986; Bertram 1986, 1987, 1993; Watters 1987). Central to our analysis was a particular constellation of economic forces that we labeled, rather casually, the mirab economy—an acronym made up of Migration, Remittances, Aid, and Bureaucracy, and signifying an economic situation in which current-account transfer payments (remittances, dividends, interest earnings, social welfare payments, government budgetary subventions, and a wide variety of other official transfers generically categorized as “aid”1) and nontradable production (generally dominated by government, hence the term Bureaucracy), function as the leading sectors in economic development, in place of the World Bank’s preferred mix of export-led tradable production and private-sector investment. Our original purpose in putting forward the mirab model was to challenge the thinking behind the strenuous efforts of aid donors and international agencies, both then and now, to drive small island economies away from what seems to be their natural and preferred pattern of resource allocation under the international conditions of the late twentieth century, and to force them into a development model transferred from mainland Asia (and before that, from the writings of the classical economists). The usually rather limited theoretical analysis behind island development plans and international agency programs of the 1980s conceptualized the status quo in Polynesia and Micronesia as “dependent” and “unsustainable,” leading to the proposition that resources and policy support should be allocated away from, rather than toward, strengthening and developing that status quo. Enormous amounts of money and effort were then poured

/pdf/the-mirab-model-twelve-years-on-35g9byzqka.pdf

The MIRAB Model Twelve Years On

State and Society in Papua New Guinea: The First Twenty-Five Years

Policy Making and Implementation: Studies from Papua New Guinea

/pdf/a-short-history-of-mineral-development-policies-in-papua-new-3fx7akmiaq.pdf

A Short History of Mineral Development Policies in Papua New Guinea, 1972-2002

Various aspects of the problem of promoting further productive employment oppor tunities in Papua New Guinea are examined in this paper. One is the price of labour, especially the level at which ur...

Employment and Wages Policy in Papua New Guinea

/pdf/exchange-rate-and-macro-economic-policy-in-independent-papua-1fpct0ynlj.pdf

Exchange Rate and Macro-Economic Policy in Independent Papua New Guinea

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Exchange Rate and Macro-Economic Policy in Independent Papua New Guinea