MOST political leaders play up their country’s economic performance. Those on the Cook Islands, a collection of 15 islets spread over 2m square kilometres in the South Pacific, are doing the opposite.

At issue is whether the country of 17,000 people has become wealthy enough to warrant a reassignment by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, from upper middle-income to high-income status. The rub is that “graduation” would make it more difficult for the country to claim it qualifies for aid. This amounted to NZ$33m ($22m) in 2016, or just under 8% of the islands’ GDP. However, New Zealand, the biggest donor country to date, has said it will continue to give an unspecified amount of financial assistance if the Cook Islands graduates.

Henry Puna, the prime minister, has acknowledged that achieving high-income status would be a source of national pride. It would be a first for a Pacific-island state. But he has warned that “premature graduation could have serious implications” for his country. The finance ministry downplays the islands’ impressive average annual growth of around 5% between 2014 and 2016. It noted in a recent press release that “economic growth may not have been as strong as we thought”.

The OECD sorts countries into groups based on their gross national income (GNI) per person. Countries that exceed the high-income threshold, as defined by the World Bank, for three consecutive years are promoted to the list of developed countries. (In 2016 the high-income threshold was $12,236.) The Cook Islands, however, does not produce data for GNI, only for GDP, which does not include net income from abroad. So when the OECD hinted last year that the islands appeared ready for graduation, officials resisted, arguing that they should be granted extra time to compile their own GNI statistics. The OECD set a deadline of early 2019.