you are currently viewing::Pacific Economic Update: Slowing Growth Highlights Need for More Inclusive WorkforceJune 17, 2025-Increasing women's workforce participation could boost GDP per capita by over 20 percent across Pacific countries, shows World Bank report
The World Bank's flagship Pacific Economic Update, released today in Honiara, projects regional growth to fall to 2.6 percent in 2025, down from 5.5 percent in 2023. This comes as post-COVID recovery fades, tourism weakens in some countries, and global policy uncertainty rises. Inflation is easing but remains above pre-pandemic levels-keeping the cost of living stubbornly high. Source: worldbank.org |
April 22, 2025-Key Takeaways
According to the 2025 AI Index Report. China has accumulated 70% of global AI patents
Evidence suggests that the majority of China's AI patents are only applied for and protected within China
April 15, 2025-Key messages
Key climate change indicators again reach record levels
Long-term warming (averaged over decades) remains below 1.5℃
Sea-level rise and ocean warming irreversible for hundreds of years
March 31, 2025—While the ocean economy doubled in real terms, from USD 1.3 trillion in 1995 to USD 2.6 trillion in 2020, co-ordinated policy action is essential to safeguard its long-term prosperity and sustainability, a new OECD report finds. The OECD Ocean Economy to 2050 identifies key priorities for policymakers to secure a resilient and sustainable future ocean economy, balancing economic opportunity with environmental responsibility.
March 30, 2025-Fast fashion is accelerating an environmental catastrophe, with the equivalent of one garbage truck's worth of clothing either incinerated or sent to landfill every second, the UN chief warned on Thursday.
Speaking at an event commemorating Sunday's International Day of Zero Waste, Secretary-General António Guterres called for urgent action to curb the textile industry's devastating impact on the planet.
March 26, 2025-2025 marks a milestone: the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement and the deadline for countries to submit their updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), designed to keep the global goal alive of limiting temperature rise to 1.5℃C above pre-industrial levels.
March 20, 2025--By mid-2024, artificial intelligence large language models (LLMs) were running into diminishing returns to scale in training data and computational capacity. LLM training began to shift away from costly pre-training to cheaper fine-tuning and allowing LLMs to 'reason' for longer before replying to questions.