The Persistence of Cambodian Poverty: From the Killing Fields to Today.

• Author: Ear, Sophal
• Position: Book review

The Persistence of Cambodian Poverty: From the Killing Fields to Today. By Harold R. Kerbo. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2011. Softcover: 211pp.

Few books on Cambodia have excited me as much as this one in recent years. While it paints a damning, if accurate, picture of contemporary failures of development in Cambodia, the author, Harold Kerbo, a professor of sociology at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, does so convincingly with his anthropological and statistics-laden methodological approach. The book begins ominously enough with a refusal to name the author's informants in Cambodia: "Unfortunately, for reasons that will be more clear throughout the pages of this book, I cannot thank any of these people in Cambodia by name. Especially in the case of Cambodian academics and government officials because I fear for their safety if they are identified" (p. 3). Indeed, years ago I published a paper on Cambodia in which I hid the identities of most of my informants. However, an international adviser, who was among the few I named, suffered retribution. This experience is corroborated by Kerbo who adds, "I have no reservations about naming my sources for information from my fieldwork for this book in Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. I will not [emphasis original] name my sources in Cambodia; in fact, I will give misleading clues about whom they might be because I fear for their safety" (p. 8).

In the parlance of political science, Kerbo's dependent variable is poverty, which he never defines precisely, although it is obvious he adopts per capita income at one point, and the dollar-a-day benchmark subsequently. He explains that while there has been impressive economic growth (8 to 10 per cent in the 2000s) and some poverty reduction in the past decade, "More recently, however, conditions for tens of thousands of poor Cambodians have grown worse ... Many more poor Cambodians are losing their homes and land because of the economic boom since 2001. A building boom in Phnom Penh has resulted in 'land grabs' by rich Cambodians and foreign construction companies (mostly South Korean and Chinese)" (pp. 5-6).

Kerbo's independent variable--or at least the one he argues matters most--is bad governance. He would have found a fan in George Soros who quipped that "Most of the poverty and misery in the world is due to bad government, lack of democracy, weak states, internal strife, and so...