Koror, Palau: Tourism maybe Palau’s bread and butter, but it needs to promote and trade in other services other than hosting tourists, says Gainmore Zanamwe, Trade Policy Analyst from Pacific Islands Forum

“It’s basically a question of trying not to put all your eggs in one basket,” Mr Zanamwe said.

He added that in general, Palau is doing very good in terms of trade and services compared to other Pacific Island countries. And tourism plays a big part in making sure that it stays that way. It contributes at least 60 percent to the overall gross domestic product of Palau.

Despite the blow of the global economic crisis, tourism in Palau is still doing very well. But Zanamwe stressed that the message they’re trying to send to Palau is that there are a lot of external factors that affect tourism aside from financial crisis. There's the swine flu, for example. “Any means of global shock that will affect Japan, your major tourism source market, or even the US or Korea, the tourism industry in this country will disappear overnight,” he said.

During the National Trade Policy Framework session held this week in Koror, Zanamwe discussed the 12 service sectors classified by the World Trade Organization. But he said the most important of these sectors as far as Palau is concerned are transportation, communication and education.

“If you have poor access to the internet, or if it’s very expensive to make calls, it would be difficult for foreign investors to do business in Palau,” Zanamwe explained. He said that to aid in the trade and investments, they encourage an open regime for other players to come and operate in the telecommunications industry.

Next is transportation, ports in particular. “We don’t want just one person to be operating the port and not do a good job about it,” he said. He said it will slow the development of all other operations.

Another is education. He said the government needs to invest a lot in terms of education. According to him,

“To be able to support all other economic services, you need people who are well trained and skilled."

He noted that this is the problem that leads Palau to hire people from other countries because the locals don’t have the skills and capacity to do certain jobs.

Palau hires many workers from the Philippines, for example; but the latter does not get workers from Palau in exchange.

“This is an area that needs to be strengthened in either tertiary education or trainings,” Zanamwe added.

He also said that environmental services should be taken into account.

Then there are also the so-called cultural, recreational and sporting services, which are likewise being imported these days.

“Take the Caribbean for example, they have Bob Marley and Wyclef Jean,” he shared. He said that if Palau can train people to be able to sing, there will be people that will come to the country to just listen to the artist sing, or they could go abroad and perform music.

So far, Zanamwe said, some of the people he’s been talking to “kinda like the idea. It’s a question of trying to market it, promote it and sell it as cultural service.”