Papua New Guinea High Frequency Phone Survey, Continuous Data Collection 2023

Access to up-to-date socio-economic data is a widespread challenge in Papua New Guinea and other Pacific Island Countries. To increase data availability and promote evidence-based policymaking, the Pacific Observatory provides innovative solutions and data sources to complement existing survey data and analysis. One of these data sources is a series of High Frequency Phone Surveys (HFPS), which began in 2020 as a way to monitor the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic, and since 2023 has grown into a series of continuous surveys for socio-economic monitoring. See https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/pacificislands/brief/the-pacific-o… for further details.

For PNG, after five rounds of data collection from 2020-2022, in April 2023 a monthly HFPS data collection commenced and continued for 18 months (ending September 2024) –on topics including employment, income, food security, health, food prices, assets and well-being. This followed an initial pilot of the data collection from January 2023-March 2023. Data for April 2023-September 2023 were a repeated cross section, while October 2023 established the first month of a panel, which is ongoing as of March 2025. For each month, approximately 550-1000 households were interviewed. The sample is representative of urban and rural areas but is not representative at the province level. This dataset contains combined monthly survey data for all months of the continuous HFPS in PNG. There is one date file for household level data with a unique household ID, and separate files for individual level data within each household data, and household food price data, that can be matched to the household file using the household ID. A unique individual ID within the household data which can be used to track individuals over time within households.

Cleaned, labelled and anonymized version of the master file.

* Collection start: 2023
* Collection end: 2025