Oil and Cambodia — from Camry to Humvee
August 30, 2006
The Cambodia Daily weekend edition had a really great story about the discovery of oil in Cambodia and its likely consequences on the country. The Daily, unfortunately, has no real web site, and the story — Pipe Dreams: How Would Cambodia Manage an Oil Boom — really was too complex to easily summarize and just plain too long to copy.
In a bit of serendipity, The Christian Science Monitor today runs a similar version of The nickel version:
By some estimates – according to the UNDP – it’s not unreasonable to believe that in the coming years, revenue from gas and oil deposits will more than double Cambodia’s GDP, which now stands at about $5 billion (much of that is from foreign aid). And that’s not even counting the disputed zones between Thailand and Cambodia, which could be the richest of all.
“I think that the oil and gas in the overlapping area is 10 times bigger than the oil [in] Block A,” says Men Den, director of exploration at the National Petroleum Authority.
So why then are development experts wringing their hands? The list of developing nations ruined by the “resource curse” is a long one, many say.
Over the past 35 years, per capita incomes in countries with a dominant, nonrenewable resource grew two to three times slower than those of resource-deficient countries, according to one paper prepared by the Overseas Development Institute.
Many diplomats and NGOs in Phnom Penh worry that the oil and natural gas – which could start flowing as soon as 2009 – could reverse more than a decade of poverty alleviation and transform Cambodia into a full-scale kleptocracy.
But read the whole thing, there are some points for optimism.
