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The issue of poverty is receiving increased attention in Papua New Guinea. But the existing evidence gives no indication of when poverty might be eliminated and has nothing to say about how economic growth might reduce poverty. This paper uses a new measure of poverty which shows the average time taken to exit poverty with a constant and uniform economic growth rate. Under historical growth rates, it would take an average of 20 years for poor Papua New Guineans to escape from poverty. The fight against rural poverty is likely to take even longer, because the rural poor are further below the poverty line and are likely to face lower economic growth rates. Limited temporal comparisons suggest that the time taken to escape poverty is rising rather than falling in Papua New Guinea.

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