A RESEARCH company involved in the Pacific has said surveys conducted over the past two weeks has shown that business confidence in Papua New Guinea “is staggering” and the most positive the company has ever seen.
Caz Tebbutt Dennis, managing director of Tebbutt Research, said this confidence existed despite widespread concerns about the cost of doing business as well as concerns about law and order and poor infrastructure.
“The larger businesses are more confident than small businesses but all are pretty confident,” she said, noting that Tebbutt has conducted 500 market research projects throughout the Pacific including 30 in PNG.
Ms Dennis also said there was a “much stronger local ownership” of business in PNG than anywhere else in the Pacific region.
The company’s surveyed had focused mainly on micro, small and medium enterprises, where companies with five to 20 employees were dominant with 90% having a turnover of less than US$125,000 (K400,000) a year.
However, productivity was lower than elsewhere in the region with PNG businesses also the “youngest businesses in the region”.
The key barriers to growth in this sector were law and order as well as price regulations, access to land and access to capital.
According to Ms Dennis, 86% of respondents to her survey said it was hard to get a loan and less than 50% in Mt Hagen and Lae had access to a computer.
Another speaker, Tony Hughes, a consultant with the Commonwealth Secretariat and a former governor of the Central Bank of Solomon Islands, said commercial banks should be enlisted in a national public-private partnership to reduce the risk and cost of financing small and medium scale enterprises.
He said an analysis of risks and cost factors should be carried out and regional development banks such as the Asian Development Bank and International Finance Corporation approached to assume a substantial part of the risk.
 

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