Devpolicy Blog 25 February 2021 – Neither Fiji nor Papua New Guinea, the two economic giants of the Pacific, has been able to increase spending to respond to the health or the economic fall out of the COVID-19 pandemic and recession.
In both countries, after adjusting for inflation, spending in 2021 will be about the same as it was in 2019. The consistency of spending before COVID-19 (2019) and after the onset of the pandemic (2021) across both countries over the three years is quite remarkable, and clearly evident from the graph below. (2020, though not shown, is hardly different either.)
What the graph also makes clear is that the situation in both Fiji and PNG is very different to that here in Australia, where the government has engaged in a massive spending splurge, increasing spending by about 39% to protect Australians against the pandemic downturn.
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