Mining has been a controversial industry in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Its newsworthiness has stemmed from the dramatic environmental and social consequences that have dogged mining development in PNG over the last several decades. Without downplaying the importance of these issues in any way, the focus in the present paper is on the relationship between mining and poverty in two of the country’s largest mining regions – Ok Tedi and Porgera. We use the techniques of logistic regression and propensity score matching to investigate the differences between mining and non-mining villages in these two regions. The results overall suggest that mining does reduce poverty, but when you correct for non-randomness in the data the effects are much smaller than it first appears.
