IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/asiaps/v12y2025i1ne70001.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Real Wage Growth in Papua New Guinea Over Three Decades

Author

Listed:
  • Niels‐Hugo Blunch
  • Martin Davies

Abstract

As a key determinant of household welfare, workersʼ real wages matter. Limited by small and infrequent surveys, the study of real wages in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has until now been constrained by a paucity of data. Using a novel dataset, we construct the first longitudinal series of wages for (to a close approximation) the population of formal private sector workers in PNG over a 3 decades span from 1999 to 2018. We examine real wage growth for the formal private sector in PNG over a 20‐year period using panel regression. Among the main findings are that conditional real wage growth has averaged about 4.5%. Also, real wage developments closely mirror the bust‐boom‐bust episodes of the macroeconomic cycle. Further, conditional real wage growth in the agricultural sector lagged that in services, industry, and mining with agriculture hardest hit during busts and lagging during the boom and mining the winner. Men experience higher conditional real wage growth during booms but also bear the majority of the decrease during busts. Finally, we establish the strong co‐movement of the real exchange rate (RER) and the conditional real wage, providing support for the RER as an important determinant of real wages in PNG.

Suggested Citation

  • Niels‐Hugo Blunch & Martin Davies, 2025. "Real Wage Growth in Papua New Guinea Over Three Decades," Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 12(1), January.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:asiaps:v:12:y:2025:i:1:n:e70001
    DOI: 10.1002/app5.70001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/app5.70001
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/app5.70001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:asiaps:v:12:y:2025:i:1:n:e70001. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=2050-2680 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.