Pacific economies have limited capacity to absorb shocks such as the Iran war, leaving them at risk of a “lost decade” of development on top of earlier crises.

Official development finance to the Pacific increased in 2024, ending three years of decline. The rise came predominantly from concessional loans, which offset falling year-on-year grants. Total ...

Loans from its mid-2010s lending boom are now entering acute repayment phases, leaving Tonga, Samoa, and Vanuatu with substantial debt obligations to Beijing. In 2024, Chinese aid spending in the ...

Pacific governments have more than doubled social protection spending over the past decade, from 0.9% to 2.3% of gross national income. External financing has ...

Pacific Island economies are among the world’s most energy insecure. Recent fuel-market volatility has underscored continued dependence on imported fossil ...

Aid to the Pacific is increasingly concentrated among a few major partners, with Australia by far the largest. The United States has cemented a long-term commitment to the three Compact states, ...

When Papua New Guinea announced last week that Taiwan’s representative office would “no longer be recognised” (Opens in new window) within its jurisdiction, the reflex was to file the news under a ...

Aid and other official development finance (ODF) remain central to how Pacific governments weather shocks and build resilience. This year’s Pacific Aid Map captures the position from which the region ...

Democratic erosion is the incremental and multifaceted deterioration in the freedoms, guarantees, and processes vital to the functioning of democracy. Various studies have tried to pinpoint one cause ...

As maritime coercion in the South China Sea becomes ever more routine, Southeast Asian governments have focused on managing tensions while continuing to underutilise one of the region’s most potent ...

When Narendra Modi arrives in Australia this week, much of the focus will rightly be on how far the India–Australia relationship has travelled. This will be his third visit (Opens in new window) as ...

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke plainly (Opens in new window) when he recently said that China was keen on increasing its influence “at a minimum, and [achieving] hegemony in the ...