The trade, investment and economic cooperation arrangements Papua New Guinea has with other countries and multilateral economic organizations will continue to be a priority of the government to actively implement. The key priority is to promote, protect and build a strong open and conducive international economic environment that will facilitate cross-border trade and investments for sustainable economic development and economic diversification, downstream processing, job creation and competitiveness.

With the focus in Asia – Pacific region, there will be increasing efforts to grow and widen the economic relations including trade and investment PNG has with the countries in the Europe, Americas, Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean regions.

Guided by the foreign policy approaches, and the National Trade Policy, the Department of Foreign Affairs will focus on growing and widening PNG’s international trade and promote efforts towards attracting increasing flow of capital investment from investor countries and international financial institutions into PNG. The trade policy defines and set the regulatory mechanism for PNG to manage its international trade with the trading partners and the goal is to advance, consolidate and maximize the nation’ trading interests within and outside of the country. 

We have seen in the last ten years or more the growth in the level of trade between Papua New Guinea and the rest of the world. We expect in the years ahead for more growth and at the same time will broaden the country’s commercial position with all the trading and development partners through important multilateral trade and economic arrangements such as WTO, APEC, ACP-EU, EPA and also with the bilateral trade, investment, and economic cooperation agreements Papua New Guinea has in place with other countries. 

On direct foreign investment, Australia remains the major foreign investor in PNG and at the same time encourage some countries in the Asia region such as China, Malaysia, Japan and Korea to be major investors in the country going forward. It is therefore important that the government must address the impediments of doing business in the country such as high cost of airfares, hotel rates, transportation, and transaction cost in order for PNG to attract more direct foreign investments in the country. 

As a source of revenue for the nation, PNG actively promote, encourage and give the full support to the Government through the PNG corporate companies to grow the level of direct foreign investments in the Small Pacific Countries and other beyond the Pacific region. The investment by Papua New Guinea companies is mostly in the finance and banking, agriculture, and hotel and tourism sectors and is increasingly growing in the countries in our regions and beyond.