Papua New Guinea: Jobs, Poverty, and Resources

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a “resource-rich” country with extreme levels of poverty and very poor human development indicators. This chapter questions the common assumption that jobs created in the extractive industry sector make little or no contribution to improvements in national wellbeing because of their isolation from the rest of PNG’s economy and society. It summarizes what is known about changes in PNG’s job configuration since Independence in 1975, including those induced by the recent “resource boom,” and shows how the PNG government currently treats the problem of job creation in national development policies. The poor quality of existing datasets prevents any quantitative assessment of the contributions that different types of jobs make to productivity, living standards, and social cohesion at a national scale, but interview data collected for this study does provide some fresh insights into the contributions made by citizens employed in the extractive industry sector.