Papua New Guinea recently completed its second national household consumption survey, potentially enabling poverty comparisons with baseline estimates from 14 years earlier. But the methods used by the recent 2009/10 Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) differ in important ways from those of the 1996 PNG Household Survey (PNGHS) which makes poverty comparisons more difficult.

This talk describes the two surveys and the poverty estimates derived from them, and discusses the apparent trends from the poverty comparisons that are possible. Special attention is paid to the poverty situation in Port Moresby, for which longer term comparisons are possible (by also using the Urban Household Survey of the 1980s) that are less affected by changes in survey methods.

John Gibson is a Professor in the Department of Economics, University of Waikato and a Senior Research Associate of Motu Economic and Public Policy Research. Since receiving his PhD from Stanford University he has worked in Cambodia, China, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Thailand, Timor Leste, Tonga, Vanuatu, and Vietnam. His recent publications have appeared in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and Journal of Health Economics.

Presentation slides are available from the Devpolicy events page: https://devpolicy.crawford.anu.edu.au/event-extra/past