Promoting Employment and Welfare for the Poor in Papua New Guinea through Assistance in International Labor Migration

The Papua New Guinea (PNG) government aims to increase workers placed in labor mobility schemes from the current 1,000 to 8,000 in the coming years, creating great potential for development impacts in PNG where poverty and unemployment remain high. This is a pilot of an impact evaluation of the PNG government’s labor mobility program, which facilitates participation in the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme. The evaluation measures the effectiveness of migration facilitation interventions, such as information provision and work readiness training, in increasing international labor migration and its downstream socio-economic impacts in PNG. It will be the first randomized controlled trial (RCT) measuring the community-level development impacts of international migration.