Understanding the PNG Medium Term Development Plan (MTDP)
Development Policy Centre Papua New Guinea has no shortage of plans, visions, strategies and policy papers. Some are good, some are bad. All suffer from poor implementation. Despite the plans, and despite PNG’s mineral booms, the sad truth is that Papua New Guinean incomes, adjusted for inflation, have barely risen since independence. We are told that government’s new plan is going to change all that – incomes will increase by one third from K3430 this year to K4638 by 2015. (Actually, it’s not clear how much of the increase will be due to the implementation of the plan, and how much will be due to the LNG project, but that’s a question that could be asked at the 2011 budget lock-up on Tuesday 16 November.) The 2011-15 Medium Term Development Plan (MTDP) has not yet been released, but reports in the media give an indication of what it contains. The government will spend K36 billion over five years on a range of development initiatives that will help create 315,200 extra jobs and susta