After a break in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Australasian AID Conference (AAC) returns in 2022. Having been held in February in previous years, the conference will be shifted to the end of the year, permanently. The 2022 Australasian AID Conference will be held on 28–30 November, in partnership with The Asia Foundation.

As in previous years, the aim of AAC2022 is to bring together researchers from across Australia, the Pacific, Asia and beyond who are working on aid and international development policy (the AID in the conference acronym) to share insights, promote collaboration, and support development within the research community. With more than 650 people registering in 2020, the AAC has established itself as Australia’s premier aid and development conference.

The main emphasis of AAC2022 will be on in-person attendance and presentations, with all the opportunities for interaction and networking thereby afforded. As before, AAC2022 will continue to offer livestreaming via YouTube of the Molonglo Theatre (main theatre) program however questions or comments will not be enabled through the livestream.

See more information about the conference.

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As a key determinant of household welfare, workers’ 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 for a 20-year period, spanning three decades from 1999 to 2018. This allows us to examine real wage growth for the formal private sector in PNG over this period using a panel regression. Among the main findings are that conditional real wage growth over the sample period (controlling for worker fixed effect and experience and industry concentration) has averaged about 4.5 percent. Also, real wage developments closely mirror the bust-boom-bust episodes of the macroeconomic cycle. Further, conditional real wage growth in the agricultural sector has lagged behind the services, industry, and mining sectors with agriculture hardest hit during busts and lagging during the boom and mining the winner. Finally, men experience higher conditional real wage growth during the boom but also bear the brunt of the decrease during times of bust.

Speaker
Dr Martin Davies
Associate Professor of Economics, Washington and Lee University, and Visiting Fellow, Development Policy Centre, Australian National University

Co-author
Professor Niels-Hugo Blunch
Economics, Washington and Lee University

The ANU-UPNG seminar series is part of the partnership between the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy and the UPNG School of Business and Public Policy, supported by the PNG-Aus Partnership.