Pacific economies have limited capacity to absorb shocks such as the Iran war, leaving them at risk of a “lost decade” of development on top of earlier crises.

Australia expands Pacific aid lead as China shifts strategy Riley Duke, Roland Rajah, Jack Xu ...

Riley Duke is a Research Fellow at the Lowy Institute and lead author of the Institute's Pacific Aid Map. Roland Rajah Roland ...

Loans from its mid-2010s lending boom are now entering acute repayment phases, leaving Tonga, Samoa, and Vanuatu with substantial debt obligations to Beijing. In 2024, Chinese aid spending in the ...

Official development finance to the Pacific increased in 2024, ending three years of decline. The rise came predominantly from concessional loans, which offset falling year-on-year grants. Total ...

Aid to the Pacific is increasingly concentrated among a few major partners, with Australia by far the largest. The United States has cemented a long-term commitment to the three Compact states, ...

Pacific Island economies are among the world’s most energy insecure. Recent fuel-market volatility has underscored continued dependence on imported fossil ...

Elbridge Colby’s recent dismissal (Opens in new window) of a collective “middle powers strategy” has reignited a live debate about the future of US alliances and partnerships. Colby, the US Under ...

Aid and other official development finance (ODF) remain central to how Pacific governments weather shocks and build resilience. This year’s Pacific Aid Map captures the position from which the region ...

Democratic erosion is the incremental and multifaceted deterioration in the freedoms, guarantees, and processes vital to the functioning of democracy. Various studies have tried to pinpoint one cause ...

When Narendra Modi arrives in Australia this week, much of the focus will rightly be on how far the India–Australia relationship has travelled. This will be his third visit (Opens in new window) as ...

Taliban gunmen shot (Opens in new window) people in the streets of Herat in early June during demonstrations against the regime’s brutal “morality police”, vindicating in the worst way possible ...