Assessment Of Development Results Pacific Island Countries

This report presents an independent regional evaluation conducted by the UNDP Evaluation Office in 2010. The evaluation examines the strategic relevance and positioning of UNDP support, and its contribution to the development of Pacific Island Countries (PICs) including 14 PICs scattered all over the Pacific Ocean. The report is the first independent country-level evaluation conducted by the Evaluation Office of the United Nations Development Programme in the Pacific Island Countries (PICs).

This report presents the findings of the country-level evaluation, Assessment of Development Results (ADR), undertaken by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Evaluation Office in 2006. The ADR is an independent evaluation of UNDP's relevance and contribution to a country's development over a given period of time. The goal of the ADR is to generate lessons for strengthening country-level programming and to contribute to the organization's effectiveness.

This independent Assessment of Development Results in Lao PDR, conducted by the Evaluation Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is part of a series of country-level evaluations. The evaluation examined the UNDP contribution to Lao PDR’s development from 2007 to 2010 and provides forward-looking recommendations that are useful for the formulation of the new UNDP country programme in Lao PDR.

Pacific island countries are highly vulnerable to various natural disasters which are destructive, unpredictable and occur frequently. The frequency and scale of these shocks heightens the importance of medium-term economic and fiscal planning to minimize the adverse impact of disasters on economic development. This paper identifies the intensity of natural disasters for each country in the Pacific based on the distribution of damage and population affected by disasters, and estimates the impact of disasters on economic growth and international trade using a panel regression. The results show that “severe” disasters have a significant and negative impact on economic growth and lead to a deterioration of the fiscal and trade balance. We also find that the negative impact on growth is stronger for more intense disasters. Going further this paper proposes a simple and consistent method to adjust IMF staff’s economic projections and debt sustainability analysis for disaster shocks for the Pacific islands. Better incorporating the economic impact of natural disasters in the medium- and long-term economic planning would help policy makers improve fiscal policy decisions and to be better adapted and prepared for natural disasters.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is committed to developing and updating a comprehensive set of comparable and accessible data to help measure performance of social protection programs in Asia and the Pacific. This 2016 report is the first comprehensive assessment of government social protection programs in 13 Pacific island countries, while a similar report presents data collected for 25 countries in Asia. This publication is an update of the 2013 report, The Social Protection Index: Assessing Results for Asia and the Pacific. It is intended to help monitor and assess the nature of government social insurance, social assistance, and labor market programs in the Pacific.

This is a prepublication excerpt of Resilience and Growth in the Small States of the Pacific.