Cambodia's Curse, a Review

The author is no doubt correct to point out that, among many factors, the lack of the rule of law and uneducated Cambodians and their politicians are the curses to Cambodia’s development.  Are Cambodians resistant to change?  There...

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Hun Sen's Cambodia: review

The author discusses issues in this book in his journalistic professionalism, not in political or economic models. In most parts, he interviewed relevant persons, told stories and most importantly stuck to main points. Through...

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Free to Choose

Prof. Mankiw of Harvard has written two worldly popular textbooks in economics: Principles of Economics and Macroeconomics. There are many universities and professors who use his textbooks in classrooms. In my university, Kobe University, his textbooks are popular for undergraduate and graduate levels. I enormously like his books, and that is where I got to know the book Free to Choose.    In his note on his further...

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Cambodia promotes motorcycle helmets to halt rise of traffic deaths

In the end of 1990s to 2000s, the largest social ill in Cambodia was the spread of HIV/AID. Recently this is no longer the issue. Most people now understand about the disease and how to prevent it. However, currently the largest social ill is death toll from traffic accidents. Statistics aside, I can see traffic accident one every day in average on my way of commutation from and to workplace. The article is right in that people...

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Ream Beach and Investment

The beach is beautiful, the water is crystal clear and shallow and is surrounded by trees and mountains nearby. The area is not much inhabited. It is on the left hand side on the way from Koh Kong to Sihanoukville near the airport....

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Cha Ret Khmer (Khmer Characteristics)

Summary It is a rather well-known book by a nationalistic politician name Bun Chan Mol (ប៊ុណ្ណ ចន្ទម៉ុល) who spent his life serving Cambodia under many regimes and at the same time observed the atrocity of committed by Cambodians,...

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Why Nations Fail

You may wonder why Cambodia, among other poor countries, fail to develop. Why we are poor and other are rich? You have answers, of course. You may point to the fact that we had wars, thus no human capital i.e. no knowledgeable persons who know how to develop the country. Some would point to the fact that we are born lazy, i.e. our culture does not induce hard working like Vietnamese culture or Japanese culture. Of course, very...

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Strongman, The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen

But rather than making it a substantive biography, the authors turned the work into a lengthy praise of the man, which ends up weakening the credibility of the work. The Cambodia Daily. True! And this book does not deserve my lengthy review.  This book is nothing short of autobiography, as it is just written by someone else. Basically the authors just ask Prime Minister Hun Sen what happened, listened and wrote...

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