Stamp Investment Tip: New Guinea 1931 Officials (Scott #O12-22)

   In 1931, New Guinea issued a set of Officials by overprinting eleven stamps from its Bird of Paradise series  "OS" for Official Service (Scott #O12-22). Only 4,500 sets were issued, and Scott '14 prices the unused set at $266.50 .

   I believe the set to be grossly undervalued because it's been neglected as an obscure back-of-book issue, as is often the case with Officials. 

   While I sometimes recommend obtaining expertization when purchasing overprinted issues, it's not necessary in this case because the Officials set is not sufficiently more costly than the basic stamps to justify faking the overprint.

 Most of the collectors of Papua New Guinea are British Commonwealth collectors or Australians, because the country was administered by Australia until 1975, and maintains close ties with that nation. I recommend purchase of the better stamps of Papua, New Guinea, and Papua New Guinea based on the probable growth in interest among Australian collectors, and collectors of British Commonwealth.

 Papua New Guinea is richly endowed with natural resources, but exploitation has been hampered by the rugged terrain and the high cost of developing infrastructure. Agriculture provides a subsistence livelihood for most of the population of about 7 million. Annual GDP growth has averaged an impressive 7% over the last 5 years. Still, the majority of the population is extremely poor, and I do not foresee the development of a significant collecting population within the country for some time.

  Those interested in viewing a list of scarce stamps with printing quantities of 100,000 or fewer may wish to check out the StampSelector Scarce Stamp Quantities Issued List, which currently contains over 9,700 entries. Researching quantities issued data is vital to determining in which stamps to invest.