First Pacific Island to publish state-owned enterprises online

Transcript

CHRISTOPHER RUSSELL: The Asian Development Bank through the Private Sector Development Initiative, which is co-financed by the Australian and New Zealand government who has been working with the Ministry of Public Enterprise in Tonga that looks after their public enterprises or as we would call them state-owned enterprises to develop a website to enable them to publish important information on their public enterprises, recognising that they are publicly owned and therefore the public should know what's happening, but also because these enterprises are such a huge sector of the economy. They represent around about 23 percent of total fixed assets and of course being involved in water and power and airports and ports and all other things, the performance impacts the lives of every Tongan citizen, so its important that people know what's going on and know how these entities are being held in account.

SELA JANE AHOLELEI: Just on that, can you put into context why the publication of this information is important?

CR: These entities are such large parts of the economy and they can have both positive and negative impacts, if your power and your water utilities have been run well and are operating efficiently and are producing appropriately charged services, well then everyone benefits from that. If not run well and dragging money out of the government or running inefficiently or charging more because of high cost structures, then everyone suffers accordingly and the economy suffers and doesn't grow as fast as it could. So the performance of these SOEs is intimately linked in with the performance of the Tongan economy as it is in many economies around the world and the enterprises are usually large. Half of the economy will have a huge impact.

SJA: Where does this new website place Tonga in relation to other countries in the region and the world?

CR: Places Tonga very high. Tonga was one of the first countries back in 2010 to require the publication of summary of financial information on their public enterprises and newspapers. The ADB we do a regular survey of performance of public enterprises around the Pacific. Some of the countries involved in that asked if we could help them with that to make this information available. Tonga is the first to have their website up and running. So they are really ranking very high within the Pacific realm. They are also internationally. There are not many countries around the world that will have the amount of information so publicly available as Tonga will and the value of the information too.