Cover Report
In full force...the PNG delegation who accompanied Prime Minister Peter O’Neill during a visit to Fiji last month.
But in an almost unexpected move, PNG decided to lift import tariffs on over 400 items on its Negative List component of the MSGTA, opening its market of over 7 million people, quite a luxury for a region where countries, scattered and far-flung from developed economies and from each other with little to offer by way of trade, are more water than land. And where PNG alone is 76 percent of total population, 87 percent of total landmass and 15 percent of total Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) area if you take the collective geography and population of the 14 Pacific members of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). Not only that, the resource-rich country is now in an economic growth surge on the back of a growing list of minerals and gas projects that are pumping millions of dollars into the local economy. Free labour movement Huge shift too was the weight thrown by MSG countries behind the MSG Skills Movement Scheme (SMS), a temporary labour scheme allowing MSG skilled professionals to move freely across member countries to work. MSG Leaders initially announced the SMS during their special summit in Suva in March this year, fast tracking what they would have wanted to achieve as members of PIF. Under PIF, MSG countries are also parties to the Pacific Islands Countries Trade Agreement (PICTA), a free trade agreement among Pacific members of PIF and under which a lengthy and complex negotiation course on trade in services is still being carried out. By September, MSG’s SMS was up and running in all MSG countries and take-up should, in the months ahead, begin to take
form once official procedures in the four countries are synchronized. Imagine hundreds of skilled MSG nationals – doctors, engineers, pilots, mechanics and teachers – moving with little restriction across four of the Pacific’s biggest economies to work. The scheme, not yet legally binding and still a Memorandum of Understanding according to MSG Secretariat Director of Trade Mere Falemaka, is capped at 400 at this stage depending on the labour shortages of MSG member countries. All eyes are unsurprisingly on PNG, with its minerals bonanza and renewed interest in tourism creating a big vacuum for skilled workers that it doesn’t have. One can only guess what an exodus to PNG would do to the other MSG economies in terms of freeing up their own job markets and foreign exchange earnings from remittances. In Solomon Islands, its sole employment recruitment service agency Pasifiki Services Ltd hopes the scheme would give the country’s young graduates the chance to gain the experience normally required by employers and which they often lack because few employers would take fresh graduates. “An interesting feature that we are just learning from our data base is that the largest number on our database is people with finance and management qualification. And it’s also the company position that we get most frequently asked to help find,” said Bob Pollard, managing director of Pasifiki Services operating out of Honiara. “But employers are always looking for someone with experience so we’re caught in a situation where we have a large number of predominantly certificate, diploma and degree holders but they don’t have experience. And it’s just sad that at this rate, our economy is not Islands Business, November 2012 17