Average life expectancy across Pacific Island countries has risen to 68.8 years from 52.7 in 1960, with Solomon Islands among the countries that moved from below the regional average to above it, two economists wrote on the Devpolicy Blog.
The article was written by Dr Albert Prabhakar Gudapati, Senior Lecturer and Head of the Economics Division in the School of Business and Public Policy at the University of Papua New Guinea, and Stephen Howes, Director of the Development Policy Centre and Professor of Economics at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.
The gain of 16 years for the Pacific Island countries is below the rate of progress of middle-income countries as a group, they said. Lower-middle income countries gained an average of 23 years over the same period and upper-middle income countries 19 years.
Solomon Islands and Vanuatu both moved from below the Pacific average to above it, according to the article. Cook Islands went from an average life expectancy to the highest in the Pacific.
Fiji fell from the highest in the region to below average, the authors said. Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia also moved from above the average to below it.
The smallest improvement was in Naoero, they wrote. Its life expectancy was above the upper-middle-income average in 1960 and in 2023 was below even the low-income average, falling from third-highest in the Pacific to lowest, four years behind the next country.
There is almost no relationship within the Pacific between life expectancy in 1960 and in 2023, the authors said. Globally, 56 per cent of the variation in current life expectancy can be explained by 1960 levels; for the Pacific the figure is 0.2 per cent.
Income explains little as well. For the world, income variation explains 67 per cent of the variation in life expectancy, they said, but only 1.5 per cent in the Pacific. That correlation improves a lot if Naoero is taken out of the sample.
A full explanation is beyond the scope of the article, the authors said, adding that there may be problems with the data. They pointed to work on the blog by Ian Anderson on medical challenges in the Pacific, including high and growing levels of diabetes.
Naoero went through a severe fall in income from the 1980s to the 2000s, they said, and more than one in five adults there has diabetes, among the highest rates in the world. Some argue the country is still paying the price of phosphate mining, including through poor air quality.
Naoero has run exercise promotion campaigns and has handed management of its health system to the United Arab Emirates company Global Mission Support Services, the authors said. It is too early to say whether the arrangement will last or make a difference, they wrote.
Unlike Cook Islands and Niue, whose citizens hold New Zealand passports and whose life expectancy is the highest in the Pacific, Naoero's citizens have no open migration pathway, they said, which makes overseas health care difficult and expensive.
Life expectancy figures in the article come from the World Development Indicators July 2026 release. Cook Islands data are from UNStats and Niue data from national sources. Income figures use Gross National Disposable Income from Chowdhury and Howes (2025). Diabetes figures are from the 2024 NCD Risk Factor Collaboration study.
The research was done with support from the ANU-UPNG Partnership, an initiative of the PNG-Australia Partnership funded by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The views are the authors' own.