Transcript
MARK BROWN: Well the OECD has lists of rankings of countries around the world - least developed countries, middle income countries and upper middle income countries, of which we are a part. And that measure is determined by the OECD in terms of Gross National Income.
DON WISEMAN: Is the Cook Islands happy with that?
MB: Well it is not a matter of being happy with it. This is the measure they use - a fairly narrow measure - and the fact of the matter is that under this particular criteria of the OECD the Cook Islands will graduate to developed nation status by the end of next year.
DW: What will that mean for a place like the Cook Islands?
MB: In terms of Development Assistance the Cook Islands, for some member countries the assistance they provide cannot be counted as development assistance that these countries provide to countries around the world in terms of their development assistance agenda. So for us it means that there may be some forms of ODA that we will not be eligible for in the future, but with the Cook Islands economy where it is now, based around tourism, primarily driven by tourism, we are at a state where we have to be able to accept that and learn how to do business with our growing prosperity in different ways.
DW: But you have a number of schemes, for instance the Rarotonga water and sanitation scheme that is underway - has been underway for some time and will take some time beyond 2018 to complete so how do you get around that?
MB: Well I don't think they are going to be cutting off those particular programmes. We have committed to those. They are multi year programmes that our partners that we have engaged with have entered into. It will I guess affect future investment proposals that we are looking at. The amount of development assistance we would look to receive will no longer be available from some of our development partners - not all of them.
DW: One of the big problems for the Cook Islands is, in terms of population it is tiny, so anything you do has a very high cost per capita doesn't it?
MB: That's right. The economies of scale essentially that the delivery of services in our country, particularly in the outer islands, comes at a higher cost that it would if you were a larger populated country.
DW: So then this ranking by the OECD is this something you would challenge. Would you ask them to delay it a few years or what?
MB: Well I think one of things that we would look at and we have discussed this in other forums, not so much with the OECD. They pretty much have recognised that the way they measure a country's prosperity, t hey have set that down and it doesn't seem that they will change how they measure those countries in terms of their income status, but it means we have to do a different way of doing business with other organisations, other countries, other entities in order to attract the sort of investment for our development agenda. For us one of those areas is increasingly in climate finance. So as a country that is one of the ones that is at the most risk of climate change, despite the fact that we what is considered a high income country, we are still a very vulnerable country. So access to financing such as climate change we would see as an important part of our financing modalities moving forward.
