Devpolicy Blog from the Development Policy Centre

For decades, Papua New Guinea has struggled with some of the highest maternal and newborn mortality rates in the Pacific. Nationally, fewer than four in ten births take place with a skilled birth attendant, and this figure is as low as 20% in some of the Highlands provinces....

Exile is silent, but its pain lives on in the dreams of Afghan children. The noise of factories in Pakistan has come to supplant the ringing of school bells in the refugee settlements. Empty notebooks sit around waiting to be used in what is becoming a more distant future. For thousands of Afghan children, education is now a luxury — something they may wish to have but won’t ...

This is the first in a series of three articles examining how the Hormuz closure is reshaping energy, governance and inequality across Asia and the Pacific.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has exposed a tremendous vulnerability of the Asia-Pacific: in 2024, the region received 84% of the oil shipped through the strait and 83% of its liquefied natural gas. ...

This is the second in a series of three articles examining how the Hormuz closure is reshaping energy, governance and inequality across Asia and the Pacific.

To grasp the full extent of the current jolt across the region, it’s useful to look beyond the phrase “energy crisis”. That suggests that what is at stake is solely the price of fuel, which is a problem o...

This is the final in a series of three articles examining how the Hormuz closure is reshaping energy, governance and inequality across Asia and the Pacific.

At the time of writing, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is running at about 5% of the pre-war rates — from around 3,000 ships per month to