Measuring Mobilities and Inequalities in Papua New Guinea’s Mining Workforce

Just before Christmas 2011, I got a call from a contact in the Australian aid agency to ask if I would be able to organise a ‘country study’ of Papua New Guinea (PNG) for the World Bank’s forthcoming World Development Report on ‘Jobs’. The study would have to be initiated by the end of January 2012, and a summary report of our preliminary findings would have to be delivered by June of that year. Furthermore, the study would have to involve some kind of collaboration with counterparts in PNG and should ideally involve the collection of new information about jobs in that country. I cannot say that our study had much impact on the contents of the World Development Report itself (World Bank, 2012) because our summary report was only five pages long and the World Bank team had already decided what they were going to say about each of the countries that featured in it. But the team leaders had already promised to produce a ‘companion volume’ in which the authors of seven country studies, including ours, would have the opportunity to tell their stories at greater length. And so it came to pass (Betcherman & Rama, 2016).