Fiji's economy: visitors pay for the imports sugar once covered

What Fiji trades with the world

The goods account runs a wide and lasting deficit. In 2025 Fiji exported and re-exported goods worth F$2,534.0 million and imported goods worth F$7,383.5 million, according to the Fiji Bureau of Statistics. The gap has been there throughout the bureau's series: in 2010 the figures were F$1,605.4 million out and F$3,464.6 million in. Britannica lists the main goods exports as petroleum products, sugar, fish, clothing, mineral water and gold, sold mainly to Australia, the United States and New Zealand, and the main sources of imports as Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and China. Fuel is a large import, because there is no petroleum production at all.

Trade with the two nearest partners is lopsided in a familiar way. Australia's foreign ministry lists wheat and liquefied gas among Australian exports to Fiji, and gold and textiles among the goods going the other way. Australian money invested in Fiji goes mostly into tourism and the financial sector. New Zealand buys vegetables and clothing from Fiji and sells it dairy products and machinery, and in 2024 the two governments set a target of NZ$2 billion in two-way trade by 2030. In May 2024 Fiji announced that it would sign and ratify the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity.

Services close most of the gap. The bureau's international trade in services survey puts exports of services at F$5,128.8 million in 2025, provisionally, against imports of F$2,322.2 million. Most of that export is spending by visitors. Australia's foreign ministry puts tourism at around 40% of gross domestic product in its current brief, and Wikipedia's economy of Fiji gives a narrower figure of 24.4% for 2019; the two do not say how they measure it.

The 2024 and 2025 services figures are provisional. Exports of goods include re-exports.

How tourism carries the economy

Tourism is Britannica's first-named economic activity, and the Bureau of Statistics counts it in detail. Visitor arrivals rose from 409,955 in 1999 to 894,389 in 2019, with a fall to 294,070 in 2000, the year of the Speight crisis. They reached 986,367 in 2025. Wikipedia's account of 2000 records an estimated 7,500 jobs lost and an economy that shrank by about 10% that year.

About half of all visitors are Australian: Australia's foreign ministry counted 455,000 Australian visitors in 2024. New Zealand and the United States are the next sources in Wikipedia's account. Most come on holiday, 75% of visitors in the official statistics for 2012, and holiday spending is by far the biggest line in the bureau's breakdown of tourist earnings by purpose of visit. Provisional figures for August 2026 put arrivals that month at 99,963, up 0.2% on August 2025.

Hotels report occupancy every quarter. The room occupancy rate was 55.8% in 2019 and 56.8% in 2024, and in the December quarter of 2025 it stood at 56.6%. Bed occupancy, which counts beds rather than rooms, was 52.0% in 2019 and 54.3% in 2024. Both measures fell to 15.0% and 12.3% in 2021, the year the borders stayed shut. Britannica notes that many hotels are on small offshore islands or secluded beaches, built in local designs and materials, and that duty-free shopping and handicraft markets are part of the draw.

What the pandemic years did to output

The border closures of 2020 and 2021 show how much rests on visitors. Arrivals fell to 146,905 in 2020 and 31,618 in 2021. Real gross domestic product fell 17.2% in 2020 and a further 4.3% in 2021, then grew 17.7% in 2022 and 9.8% in 2023, according to the Bureau of Statistics' rebased series.

Nominal GDP was F$11,547.1 million in 2019, F$8,611.5 million in 2021 and F$14,196.6 million in 2025, provisionally. In 2025 services contributed 1.8 percentage points of the 2.5% real growth, net taxes 0.4 points and industry 0.3 points. Mining and quarrying grew 18.1% in real terms in 2025, and public administration and human health 8.5% each, while fishing fell 7.9% and transport and storage 8.4%. In September 2026 the Asian Development Bank forecast growth of 2.2% for 2026 and 1.9% for 2027, with inflation of 3.9% and 2.5%.

How growth has risen and fallen since independence

The record since 1970 is uneven. The Wikipedia account describes rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s, stagnation in the 1980s and a contraction after the coups of 1987. Liberalisation after the coups brought a boom in garments. The Asian financial crisis cut the number of Asian visitors in 1997 and 1998, and growth returned in 1999, helped by a 20% devaluation of the Fijian dollar. The 2000 crisis shrank the economy again, and tourism set a record in 2005.

Natural disasters have imposed costs of the same order. The post-disaster needs assessment for Cyclone Winston, which struck on 20 and 21 February 2016, put damage and losses at $1.42 billion, equal to 31% of gross domestic product, and in June 2016 the Asian Development Bank lent $50 million for rebuilding schools and housing. A cyclone that hit Vanua Levu in January 2003 caused an estimated US$30 million of damage.

Governments have tried to steer investment by tax. Concessions for large foreign investors drew criticism from the Asian Development Bank, which said in a 2005 report that the concessions had been abused and had not produced long-term investment, and from the Fiji Labour Party leader Mahendra Chaudhry, who said on 31 December 2005 that foreign companies took their profits home. A 20-year development plan announced in September 2002 set out to give iTaukei a greater stake in business through tax relief and stronger protection of indigenous land and fishing rights.

Why sugar no longer leads the export list

For most of the years after independence sugar was Fiji's main export, more than half of all exports by Britannica's account. The cane is grown on the dry western belt of Viti Levu and around Labasa on Vanua Levu, mostly by independent Indo-Fijian farmers, and milled by the government-owned Fiji Sugar Corporation. The corporation was set up by an Act of Parliament in 1972 and began operating on 1 April 1973, taking over the assets of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, which had milled in Fiji since 1880. It runs three mills, at Lautoka and Ba on Viti Levu and at Labasa, and describes itself as employing more than 1,800 people and supporting the livelihoods of more than 200,000.

Much of the crop was sold to Europe on preferential terms, under the Lomé Convention of 1975 and the Cotonou Agreement of 2000. Reforms to European sugar pricing in the early 21st century cut Fiji's income, and the industry was pushed to raise productivity. Land added its own pressure. Most cane land is leased from iTaukei clans: Britannica says alienation of native land has been prohibited since 1874, with exceptions in a few early 20th-century years, leaving nearly nine-tenths of all land in Fijian ownership. In 1977 the Agricultural Landlord and Tenant Act extended ten-year farm leases to 30 years, and the non-renewal of expiring leases, over disputes about rent indexing, has reduced output since. Drought in 1998 and low world prices in 1997 hit the crop again.

Leasehold works differently outside the cane fields. Houses and hotels on communally owned land are built on 99-year leases, and the Denarau resort development near Nadi stands on communal land and pays its owners an income. The problem the Wikipedia account identifies is specific to agricultural leases and their rents.

What else Fiji makes and grows

Garments grew fastest after tax exemptions were introduced in 1988. Using preferential access to Australia and New Zealand, foreign investors built an industry that, in Britannica's account, employed more than 20,000 local workers in the early 21st century and earned almost as much as food products, sugar included. Bottled mineral water became a significant export in the same years.

Other manufacturing is small and varied: boatbuilding, especially fishing boats and pleasure craft, brewing, cement and paint. Manufacturing produced F$1,434.4 million of nominal value added in 2025. Pine forests planted systematically from the 1960s support a timber and wood-chip industry, and fish products made up nearly a tenth of export revenue in the early 21st century. Both are small in the national accounts: forestry and logging produced F$56.4 million of nominal value added in 2025 and fishing and aquaculture F$94.4 million, against F$855.4 million for finance and insurance and F$1,481.0 million for wholesale and retail trade. Gold has been mined at Vatukoula since the 1930s, though output fell in the early 21st century and one main mine closed; Britannica records silver as well, and a copper mine that began operating at Namosi in 1997. Mining and quarrying value added rose from F$85.6 million in 2023 to F$242.9 million in 2025 in nominal terms.

Agriculture produced F$1,763.8 million of nominal value added in 2025, and it still includes a large subsistence sector, mainly iTaukei. Farmers earn cash on the side from copra, cocoa, kava, taro, pineapples, cassava and bananas, and from fishing. In 2001 subsistence farming was put at 18% of gross domestic product and some 70% of the workforce. Government policy has aimed for years at cutting food imports, rice above all.

Who manages the money

The currency is the Fijian dollar, managed by the Reserve Bank of Fiji. Section 153 of the 2013 constitution makes the bank the central bank of the state, charged first with protecting the value of the currency, and requires it to act independently while consulting the finance minister regularly. The bank arranges government borrowing through bonds and other securities, runs credit facilities for exporters, disaster recovery and housing, and publishes its reading of the economy in monthly economic reviews, quarterly reviews and annual reports. The South Pacific Stock Exchange in Suva is the only licensed securities exchange.

Energy is mostly bought in. Britannica notes substantial hydroelectric generation, but refined fuel is imported in full. Since the Rural Electrification Policy of 1993 the government has paid most of the cost of village schemes, from diesel generators and micro-hydro to solar home systems and grid extensions; communities paid 10% of project costs until 2010, when their share was cut to 5%.

The coups had economic costs that outlasted them. More than 70,000 people left in the years after 1987, most of them Indo-Fijians, and a further outflow of skilled workers followed the 2000 crisis and the expiry of cane leases. A 2003 survey counted 82,350 people in 13,725 households living in 182 squatter settlements, mostly in the Suva and Nausori area. Money sent home by Fijians working abroad, including soldiers and security guards in Iraq and Kuwait and soldiers in the British Army in the 2000s, is counted with tourism, bottled water and sugar among the main sources of foreign exchange.