Anticipating an Oil Boom: The "Resource Curse" Thesis in the Play of Cambodian Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By 2012 Cambodia will probably have begun production of offshore fields containing more than 700 million barrels of oil and 3.5 trillion cubic feet of gas. The discovery of these exploitable deposits in the Gulf of Thailand has highlighted the prospect of Cambodia accessing an income stream that would allow significant new public investments in infrastructure, service provision and the professionalization of the state bureaucracy. It has also led to warnings that Cambodia might be afflicted by the curse. The experience of oil-producing states such as Azerbaijan at the turn of the century and Nigeria more recently shows how states richly endowed with natural resource wealth often perform poorly in promoting economic and social development. As this paradox has come to be more widely recognized, scholars and policy makers have worked hard to understand why developing countries that are resource rich often fail to prosper and to discern the types of institutional structures that might bolster political stability and lead to improved economic outcomes. This aspiration has also motivated the programs of reform promoted by Western and Japanese foreign aid providers. In Cambodia's case, the anticipated production of so much oil and natural gas has prompted discussion of whether the wealth derived from its sale will bring long-term benefits to the Cambodian people. Much of the discussion has been framed by the so-called curse thesis. The Cambodian government has agreed to involve itself in a number of seminars and conferences on the potential political and economic pathologies of petroleum wealth. These included an April 2007 seminar entitled Avoid the Oil Curse and a 2008 conference entitled Fuelling Poverty Reduction with Oil and Gas Revenues: Comparative Country Experiences.1 During the earlier seminar, the chairman of the investment committee of the National Assembly, Phan Sina, stated that Cambodia was seeking technical assistance from
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".