High Tide
Sober Reality
Are We Making Progress Or Regressing?
The start of the year traditionally marks our Pacific Almanac issue, and this year it makes for some sobering reading. While we had the usual challenge of sometimes contradictory and dated data, there is some benefit in looking dispassionately at the figures. Where available, we've introduced a couple of new categories-inflation and unemployment rates. While unemployment statistics are less meaningful in some of the region's smaller, mostly subsistence agriculture-based economies, in those with significant manufacturing and service sectors they can be valuable, if worrying statistics if we look, for example, at the Marshall Islands or Fiji. And in many of the nations and territories surveyed, indicators such as Gross Domestic Product per capital have dropped markedly compared to last year's figures.
We draw most of the data in our Almanac from national sources such as statistics departments, although in some cases we have had to rely on external international organizations. The region is all-too familiar with the reports produced by these agencies and the way they often rate us against each other. For example, our finance ministers heard that Pacific Islands countries had shown slight improvements in their ratings for "Doing Business 2006" when they met this year. "Doing Business 2006" is part of a series of annual reports co-sponsored by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, which identify specific regulations that enhance or constrain investment productivity and growth, and measures countries against regional or global "best practice."
So in the 2006 survey Fiji fared best at 34 of 155 countries, followed by Tonga (36), Samoa (39), Kiribati (45), Marshall Islands (48), Vanuatu (49), Palau (50), Solomon Islands (53), Federated States of Micronesia (56) and Papua New Guinea (64). The report card for all, if we can imagine it, would read "some improvement could still do better."
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Of course, development indexes and the like can draw infuriated responses from some of our governments. For example, the chief executive in the Fiji Prime Minister's Office, Jioji Kotobalavu called the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report a joke. The UNDP report ranked Fiji 92nd (down from 81 last year) on the Human Development Index (HDI), lower than Tonga and Samoa. The HDI focuses on three measurable dimensions of human development: living a long and healthy life, being educated and having a decent standard of living.
More recently the International Monetary Fund rated Palau ahead of Marshall Islands and FSM in terms of economic growth rate. The response to that from Palauan Senator and business executive Alan Seid was that "we must not just compare ourselves to other developing countries; we must compare ourselves to our potential." He was talking about Palau but it's an attitude that would be useful throughout the region.
That potential will be largely determined by the decisions that the people of Fiji, Guam, Nauru, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Tuvalu make when go to the polls this year. Some of these elections promise to be complex and difficult, Fiji and Solomons to name two obvious examples. Nauruans will be ultimately voting as to whether they agree with the National Development Strategy outlined to donors recently, and the nature of economic rebuilding it suggests. In Tokelau-population 1,515-people will vote in a referendum on self-government in free association with New Zealand soon after this magazine reaches you-a vote that goes to the heart of discussion about how our smaller island neighbors remain viable and vibrant in this century.
We hope that the result of each of these polls reflects some hard but necessary thinking about what sort of nations we want into the future, rather than just whom we are related to, or whose slush fund we benefited from.
EDITORS NOTE: Thank you for the early feedback about our December "Pacific People" issue. We welcome corrections and any suggestions of people to the list you think we have missed, and will update it periodically on www.pacificmagazine.net.
