A week ago, there was an interesting but paradoxical article by Asian Development Bank Education and Training specialist Dr Naren Prasad “Reclaiming Fiji: beyond remittances and rhetoric” (Fiji Times, 1 Nov. 2025).
The article presumably arose from recent RBF statistics showing that remittances into Fiji amounted in 2024 to around $1,328 million (more than $1 billion), virtually the largest export earner, larger than all the other export industries such as gold, water, timber, and probably around the retained earnings of the tourism industry.
The sugar industry, in contrast earns less than $150 million in gross, yet requiring massive inputs from taxpayers, with the FSC Board Chairman Nitya Reddy recently revealing losses of a billion due to “financial mismanagement, reckless, misguided investments, wastage, corruption, leakages, kickbacks, coverups and brazen defiance of any semblance of accountability and transparency” (FT 20 Feb. 2025). The Fiji Government year after year also keeps guaranteeing FSC loans, recently increased to $300 millions.
Remittances v sugar
When economic historians look back and ask how Fiji coped with COVID when tourism totally collapsed, they will discover a quiet foreign exchange earner which owes nothing to any Government, the Remittance “industry”.
I say “industry” guardedly, but the reality is that this is not a local industry or development strategy of government but thousands of persons independently working abroad and sending money home. Some have permanently emigrated but still support their families back in Fiji.
There are also thousands of persons, of all races, both males and females, working as peacekeepers, nurses, carers, fruit pickers, rugby players, and any number of increasing occupations where there are severe shortages abroad.
The graph shows clearly that while sugar was earning more than Remittances before 2000, after that year, remittances have been on an incredible growth path officially reaching more than a $1300 million in 2024 and trending around $1.4 billion for 2025.
Had it not been for these Remittance earnings, the Fiji economy and the people of Fiji would have been in dire straits these last ten years when the Bainimarama “Boom” became a boom only in Public Debt while the real economy went “Bust”.
So why Dr Naren’s negative tone towards remittances?
It is unfortunate therefore that in his article, Dr Naren weaves together a negative slant on what remittances represent, with the legitimate but separate issue of lack of a good sustainable growth strategy by the Coalition Government, which is really independent of the question of remittances.
Dr Naren’s article expressed great alarm that remittances had become Fiji’s de facto development strategy. He noted “Fiji still lacks an integrated labour strategy linking migration, wages, education, and investment into one coherent vision. We must move from remittance economics to employment economics, from exporting labour to creating dignified, decently paid work at home. Because every time a young Fijian leaves, we lose more than a worker; we lose part of our future”.
Dr Naren’s article is full of wonderful poetic phrases which few would disagree with on their own: “development is not what departs; it is what endures… when a nation begins to lost its people, it is not the migrants who have failed, it is the policy makers who have stopped imagining a future worth staying for … when we export skills we export our future … Fiji deserves leadership that restores that imagination, rebuilds trust between government and citizen, and makes this land once again a place where people choose to live, work and dream”.
Dr Naren goes on and on in this vein throughout his article.
But the article misses the central fact: remittances are not the result of government policy, but the result of decisions of hundreds of thousands of Fiji citizens and former citizens making a conscious decision to emigrate or work abroad, permanently or temporarily, in order to obtain higher incomes for themselves and their families, and sending some proportion of those higher incomes home back to Fiji.
Some of this emigration had started well before the 1987 coup; the coups of 1987, 2000 and 2006 accelerated the emigration of many (especially Indo-Fijians) because of the political instability and insecurity they felt; but nearly all the emigration can be attributed to globalization, especially with Australia and NZ opening up their labour markets in recent years.
Before I come to Government’s role (or lack of it) in the emigration and remittances, the public can ask Dr Naren Prasad to look in the mirror and ask: why did he himself emigrate?
The author Dr Naren Prasad, in the mirror
Dr Naren, originally from Dreketi (like our former Minister of Finance Professor Biman Prasad) is himself a prime example of the “emigration” that he is so concerned about. As a good economist graduating from a university in France, he could have easily worked at USP or FNU or University of Fiji. He would no doubt have become a Professor of Economics and probably a senior administrator such as the head of a Faculty, just as Professor Biman Prasad did.
But Dr Naren has been working for a series of international organizations and currently is Head of Education and Training at ILO.
His salary at all these international positions would have been three to ten times what he would have received had he stayed in Fiji. He is not alone of course.
One of Dr Naren’s predecessors at ADB was John Samy who was driven out by the 1987 Rabuka coup from his job as Director of CPO. John Samy, while returning to work on the People’s Charter exercise and much charitable work in education for poor children, nevertheless settled in NZ after his ADB stint.
We have any number of former USP academics who have settled and work happily and very profitably abroad such as Professor Satish Chand, Professor Steven Ratuva, and recently younger academics like Dr Tui Rakuita and Dr Kushneel Prakash.
Their salaries abroad are all higher than what they could ever obtain at the local Fiji universities.
Their families (including parents and children) have better education and health conditions in their homes abroad than they could ever have in Fiji, where schools and hospital facilities have virtually collapsed.
In his article, when Dr Naren is asked by his mother in Dreketi when will their departed relatives return, he says optimistically “They will, when we make it worth coming back to”.
But will Dr Naren himself (or any of the other academics I mention above) ever return to live and work in Fiji now or in the foreseeable future? I doubt it very much.
The miracle is that so may other qualified professors have chosen to remain and work in Fiji.
Similarly the nurses, the teachers and rugby players
We can of course draw exactly the same parallels with all the nurses, teachers, doctors, architects, engineers, plumbers, electricians, rugby players, bus drivers and even fruit pickers who have gone abroad, permanently or temporarily.
The undeniable pull factor for all of them is also the relatively higher incomes and quality of life abroad in Australia, NZ, Canada and USA.
This outflow is not going to slow down or stop any time soon as long as these income and quality of life differentials exist in all their occupation groups.
The only Fiji “occupation” (if you can call it that) that has enormously increased its incomes is that of parliamentarians who within months of being elected in the December 2022 Elections, through a committee unethically consisting of themselves, had virtually doubled (and more) their salaries and perks.
Why were their salaries not set by an any independent “Higher Salaries Commission” as happens in Australia and NZ and used to happen in Fiji once upon a time before Bainimarama and Khaiyum set all the bad precedents continued by the current Government. Would you allow nurses and teachers to set their own salaries?
Read my article (FT 1 June 2024) (“Disgraceful process, shoddy UNDP consultant: Fiji not out of the woods yet” ). It may be found in my Volume 3 (Our Struggles for Democracy in Fiji: Rule of Law and Media Freedom), Reading 168. (free downloads from my website NarseyOnFiji). At some school in Fiji Dr Naren asked a student what he wanted to be when he grew up? Dr Naren was concerned that the student said he wanted to “go overseas”. Hey, that’s not a bad thing, Dr Naren.
Just ten year ago, I remember that when the same question was posed to the dux of an elite iTaukei secondary school, he replied that he would like to be X (this former military commander who had conducted a coup, made himself Prime Minister and extremely rich in the process).
You can choose your “former commander” from at least four who from 1987 to now have done extremely well materially despite committing treason against the state, yet being granted “immunity” by various constitutions and even the latest Supreme Court “Opinion”.
But these former military commanders (and the many senior RFMF Officers who assisted them) also impoverished the rest of the Fijians for decades.
Of course, today’s Fiji’s secondary students might even say, “I would like to be a parliamentarian”.
So for students to aspire to “going overseas” to earn income honestly (and sending some of it back to Fiji) must surely be some kind of progress for Fiji, not to be seen negatively as Dr Naren is doing.
What government role in economic growth?
Dr Naren conflates many issues with remittances in his article, even in the same paragraph: “In the end, reclaiming Fiji is not just an economic task, it is a political one.
It demands leaders who see beyond the comfort of remittances and the illusion of borrowed growth, and who have the courage to build an economy for those who remain”.
Surely, the issue of fostering sustainable economic growth within Fiji is an independent issue from that of enjoying remittances sent by permanent and temporary migrants abroad.
We would all agree with Dr Naren that successive Fiji government have failed to generate any new sustainable industry in Fiji over the last twenty five years.
In my community education articles, my Volume 1 (The Challenges of Growing the Fiji Economy) is devoted to fostering new industries.
For more than two decades, I have suggested that government investigate value adding industries based on our mahogany, tourism enterprises, retirement homes for the aging populations in Australia, NZ and North America, Call Centre industries, new golf course industries using the Vijay Singh brand, among others. But, today, there are virtually no new industries worth talking about, paying the higher wages that can help retain Fiji’s skilled workers.
We would all agree with Dr Naren when he states that Fiji needs a National Skills Compact uniting government, employers and education providers, mapping critical skills requiring return-of-service for publicly funded graduates — but hey, the Minster of Finance recently wrote off hundreds of millions of TELS debts and the implicit bonds for graduates which could have kept them working in Fiji.
We would all agree with Dr Naren that Government should reward skills who stay in Fiji, through housing support, tax credits, and innovation grants for entrepreneurs. And make sure that the pay of workers reflects their worth.
But why does Dr Naren not demanding decent minimum wages for workers, that employers’ associations in Fiji are still virulently opposing even today, despite severe shortages of skilled labour? What about making Wages Councils effective, which Government has still failed to do despite being three years at the helm? These are key labour market issues that ILO experts ought to be supporting.
Will Fiji conditions change to reduce emigration?
While Dr Naren refers to the “remittances” as Fiji’s “default development strategy” I doubt if there is anyone in Government’s Ministry of Planning who see or explicitly plan remittances as one of their development strategies.
Government is just happy to enjoy the benefits of remittances that arise out of all the hard work that Fiji citizens and former citizens do abroad and share part of their incomes with family and relatives in Fiji, helping Fiji’s balance of payments and consumer demand in Fiji (and perhaps investment in housing or SMEs).
Fiji’s skilled people will keep emigrating as long as incomes and living standards abroad for their families are better than at home. That is not going to stop any time soon.
Of course, Indo-Fijian remittances to Fiji may reduce as the number of their relatives left in Fiji reduce over time. But that of iTaukei people abroad will keep rising. This trend will certainly keep strengthening at least for Australia and NZ because of their increased emphasis on the regional trade agreement PACER Plus.
While three decades ago this agreement focused only on trade relations, pressure by us has slowing and successfully introduced labour mobility into it. Australia and NZ are now moving to allow families of workers to accompany them.
Of course, an additional incentive for Australia and NZ was not just the provision of labour where they faced skill shortages (exacerbated by COVID) but also as a lever to keep out the influence of China in the Pacific.
Today, there are very large proportions of Fiji and other Pacific Islanders living in Australia and NZ and it is a mistake to consider them as living in “foreign” lands.
It is not inconceivable that in time to come, Fiji and the Pacific Islands will be part of a Pacific Union. Movement of Fiji skills to Australia and NZ will not be seen as “losses” to Fiji, remittances from Fiji people in Australia and NZ to families back in Fiji will not be seen as “foreign” remittances- merely transfers within a larger regional domestic economy.
I would suggest that academics at our three Fiji universities begin in-depth studies of the nature and volumes of remittances coming into Fiji: their sources, their expenditure in Fiji, and trends over time.
Readers might like to read my article (FT 8 April 2023) two years ago (“Remittances Gold Mine: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”).
This article may be found in my Volume 3 (Our Struggles for Democracy in Fiji: Rule of Law and Media Freedom), Reading 167. Freely download from my website NarseyOnFiji.
n PROF WADAN NARSEY is one of the region’s senior economists and a regular commentator on political and economic issues in Fiji. The views belong to Wadan Narsey. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views of The Fiji Times.
