MIRAB and small islands discourse

Literature which links migration and development in the Pacific context has been pre-empted by an acronym coined in the mid-1980s. MIRAB stands for that combination of migration, remittances, aid, and bureaucracy which was claimed to describe the economic reality of many small islands. The descriptive acronym was invented by Geoff Bertram and Ray Watters following Pacific fieldwork in 1984 commissioned by Victoria University’s Institute of Policy Studies, and was seen as a more positive way of viewing Pacific realities than the dependency school.

Watters (2008) writes positively of MIRAB as a development pathway for the Pacific Islands. In the original (1985) article, Bertram and Watters introduced the concept in a way which has been lost sight of in much subsequent literature which has excessively focused on the acronym.

The Cook Islands, Niuean and Tokelauan ethnic communities therefore now span two geographically separate entities; the home islands and the New Zealand metropole. The New Zealand industrial labour market constitutes the modern sector of the Island economies while the island resident portion of each community operates the non- capitalist or traditional sector, together with the local government apparatus. (Bertram & Watters, 1985, p. 504).

Their point then becomes that it is inappropriate to analyse development prospects for either half of the islander population in isolation. A dual economy operates but in a transnational way. The

continued existence of subsistence economy was part and parcel of MIRAB. It was not suggested that the entire economy of these small islands were based on migration aid and bureaucracy. The

approach is descriptive and is not suggestive of MIRAB as a pathway to national development, as understood at the time48_.

MIRAB as a development pathway is hinted at in a follow up article (Bertram & Watters, 1986) in which it is noted that Ron Crocombe had previously identified in the case of the Cook Islands most of the MIRAB features, but

By treating the Cook Islands as though they were (or should be) an autonomous economic unit, rather than an increasingly integrated annex to the New Zealand mainland economy, Crocombe was naturally led to emphasise the negative side of the MIRAB process (especially the decline of local productive activity), and hence to present as “economic regression” a process which was in fact more of a restructuring of the village economy as households diversified their activities in order to benefit from aid and remittances.49

At this point it is becoming clear that Bertram and Watters see MIRAB as a kind of development pathway, but one that is closer in meaning ( in very broad concept) to Cardoso and Faletto’s (1979) “development in dependency”. It is a pathway which presumes that the people of the islands have full substantive citizenship of the host country, and that migrant remittances and local production continue to hold a symbiotic relationship. Twelve years later, the caution shown in early MIRAB writings was gone. MIRAB factors (from the acronym only) were now proclaimed as “the leading sectors in economic development”(Bertram, 1999, p. 105).

A level of ambiguity shown by most contributors to the relationship between MIRAB and

development may be seen in Marsters, Lewis and Friesen (2006) who contend that MIRAB retains “policy and analytical relevance, even if this is more as a heuristic device rather than as a plausible development model”(p.31); but in reference to remittance flows “they are what make MIRAB a novel model of development at the macroeconomic level” (p.33). Marsters et al. can be excused their ambiguity, because as they point out in the same article, under the Washington Consensus, none of the three central elements of the development project (McMichael, 2004, 2010), nation, state, and development “remains as central to the imaginaries of the present and possible futures, and their tight inter-relations have been ripped apart.”(p.35)

Bertram and Watters contend that the rent-based economic formation is highly sustainable due to two key ingredients, being transnational kinship networks and a political analysis which suggests that

48 _{Although McMichael dates the end of the development project in the 1970s,most work on migration} through to the 1990s was framed within the independent development of nation states.

49 _{The contention that aid and remittances “crowd out” export production as a general rule is contested by} Fraenkel (2006).

the aid component will not change50_{.However there has always been a lobby against aid to the}

islands (see, for example Hughes, 2004) and there have been signs recently that the aid consensus has shifted. The sustainability of remittances has been addressed by Connell and Brown (1995), Brown (1998), Lee (2004) and others and most of their conclusions are optimistic if inconclusive. The way in which the transnational communities are conceived has been debated by Poirine (2004), Marsters et al. (2006) and Hau’ofa (1993). Poirine seeks to retain the household as the unit of analysis and to reconstruct the MIRAB discourse based on rational economic behaviour at the micro- economic level, whereas Masters et al. suggest that remittance flows will not follow this kind of rational economic analysis at all, and a better fundamental concept to use is the network, founded on cultural as much as economic assumptions.

During the 1990s more island states, many of which do not have automatic citizenship of the host country, were added to the MIRAB list. Writing in 2006, Bertram draws on these sources to identify 23 MIRAB countries. The issue of citizenship is glossed over. New acronyms were coined to describe PROFIT (Baldacchino, 2006) and SITE (McElroy, 2006) economies, referring respectively to small states which rely on a combination of financial niche activities and tourist revenues to maintain financial solvency. There is at least an implication of equilibrium, and Bertram (2006) uses the kaleidoscope as a metaphor for the unpredictable way in which one steady state may

metamorphasise into another. An analysis of Norfolk Island by Treadgold (1999) shows one obvious pathway from MIRAB to an alternative state of being is found through tourism.

There is complacency about the MIRAB discourse which assumes a steady state and high living standards rather than the reality of urban migration and attendant squalor. Growing urban slums described by Connell (2011) do not meet any understood definitions of equilibrium, and Bertram’s assumption that one state of (loosely defined) equilibrium will metamorphose into another is pure speculation. Tonga with its very large transnational community would be well placed to provide some evidence of equilibrium, yet Lee (2007) notes that while the level of remittances remains high, the economy is declining. I cannot improve on the following statement from Fraenkel:

The primary insight arising out of the MIRAB literature is the historical account of the way post-colonial living standards have been driven up by remittances, aid, overseas property income or other forms of royalties or resource rents. The analytical claims to have established what ‘determines the evolution’ of the island economies and the view that these economies have reached some kind of a ‘steady state’ are much more tenuous (Fraenkel, 2006, p. 26).

50 _{This point is a significant weakness in the argument because a careful political analysis is missing, and the} expectation has proved inaccurate.

The acronym taxonomy used by Bertram (2006) and Watters (2008) may in fact act as a diversion from an analysis which takes account of the same elements – migration, remittances, tourism, aid, bureaucracy, financial services, and subsistence agriculture - all of which are present to varying degrees in almost all of the countries concerned. In only some cases, such as the Bahamas, the SITE economies will be demonstrably wealthier. The discourse may therefore have an unrealised potential. In later chapters I will use the term “extended MIRAB” to refer to any combination of these income generating factors as a pattern of development in dependency. This approach does not pretend to be part of the MIRAB discourse, partly because of the ambivalence of MIRAB on

development and partly because the claims of the acronym states metamorphosing removes rather than adds explanatory power. Within such an extended notion, studies of remittance sources have diversified, for example the growing awareness of professional sport for development (Stewart- Withers & Brook, 2009), and growth in seafaring (Borovnik, 2006, 2007).

MIRAB’s blind spot?

A related issue is glossed over in MIRAB discussions. In the 1985 presentation, the percentage of Pacific Islanders living in New Zealand varied from 44% for the Cooks to 61% for Niue to much lower figures from Kiribati and Tuvalu. There may come a point at which so few are left on the home island that the dualism described by Bertram and Watters no longer applies. Table 3.2 both summarises and extends Bertram’s “figure 1” from 1985, which took this information as far as the 1981 census, up to the 2006 census. In the final row, the figure for island-born New Zealanders living in New Zealand are replaced with those identifying ethnically, allowing for the growth in diaspora, and it can be seen that the figures change dramatically. For example, in the case of Niue, 1% of Niue Islanders were living in New Zealand in 1936. By 1981, 61% of Island born Niueans were living in New Zealand, and this figure had grown to 80% by 2006. But of all (self) identified Niueans, 93% were living in New Zealand by 2006, and 80% of all Cook Islanders (this figure is slightly understated given the number of Cook Island nationals who self-identify by island group as e.g. Mangaians). How extreme must these figures become before the MIRAB “analysis” gives way to a simpler case of mass population removal? Portes (2009) draws a clear distinction between cyclical migration flows which are claimed to produce positive developmental outcomes attributed to the ‘new’ economics of labour migration and permanent out-migrations which have the opposite effect.

Table 3-2: Island Born Population by Place of Residence Year Cook Islands In NZ (%) Total Cooks Niue In NZ (%) Niue total Tokelau _{In NZ (%) Total} Tokelau 1936 11,943 157 (1) 12,100 4,105 54 (1) 4,159 1,170 0 (0) 1,170 1951 14,757 999 (6) 15,756 4,553 330 (7) 4,883 1,571 10 (0.6) 1,581 1961 18,378 3,374 (16) 21,752 4,868 1,414(23) 6,282 1,860 23 (1) 1,883 1971 21,317 7,389 (26) 28,706 4,990 2,912(37) 7,902 1,655 950 (36) 2,605 1981 17,695 13,848 (44) 31,543 3,278 5,091(61) 8,369 1,572 1,281 (45) 2,853 2006 14,200 14,697 (51) 28,897 1,625 4,851(80) 6,476 1,466 1,587 (52) 3,053 2006 * 14,200 56,895 (80) 71,095 1,625 22,476(93 24,101 1,466 6,819 (82) 8,285

Source: Bertram and Watters, 1985, updated by author from NZ census data.

*In this row island born figures replaced with those identifying ethnically showing growth in diaspora. Remittance levels should be affected in paradoxical ways.

The MIRAB argument was put forward as an alternative to a dependency perspective which held currency at the time Bertram and Watters began their studies. As argued by Obregon, (1980) there were two forms of dependency, national subordination and structural dependence. What MIRAB demonstrates is really a form of structural dependence with some unusual features. In the following section I argue that there remains a place for dependency theory in broad perspective.