Typhoon or big bright sun: the economic forecast on Cambodia goes wild

Short, poor, ill and corrupt, or, in other words, the new potential composite of the average Cambodian person elaborated on the basis of statistical figures circulated here and there by various international and national organisations intervening in Cambodia. However, despite the profusion of reports, charts, tables and databases supposed to dissect the Cambodian economy and society, finding recent and reliable elements in the jungle of numbers that these statistics made in Cambodia represent remains a hard task. Alarmist views regarding the economic crisis do not help either since they provide indices which take different shapes and prove randomly malleable. And indeed, predictions for 2009 might well make one feel giddy, as they bet on an economic growth rate oscillating between 1% and... 6%, according to sources. Even though analyses disagree on the results concerning the past few years, forecasting Cambodian economy looks like a tough challenge.

GDP: who can lower the stakes?
The International Monetary Fund is definite on that point: Cambodia is going to be badly stricken by the global economic crisis. Six months ago only, the same organisation reckoned that despite a slight downturn, the Cambodian economy remained “robust”, and all indicators are today are in the red: a decrease in orders in the textile industry, a drastic drop in the number of tourists, a massive decline in the building sector ... The direct result is that the growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product, which was due to go above 7% in 2008 was revised downwards and reached an estimated 6.5% at the end of the year. For 2009, according to the latest report released by the institution, the growth rate should not go over 4.8%, a prediction which is already dubbed as optimistic by John Nelmes, IMF Resident Representative in Cambodia.

For its part, the World Bank , who also revised its estimations for the past years (the 7.5% estimated in 2008 were brought down to 6.7%), predicts for 2009 a growth rate close to 5% (4.9% to be precise, i.e. 2 points below the initial predictions). The Asian Development Bank (ADB ) forecasts for its part 4.7%. And the Economist Intelligence Unit (a branch specialising in economic statistics and forecasts within the private British group The Economist) is the naysayer in the lot, putting forward predictions of a rate close to 1%, in other words the weakest Cambodia has ever seen, at least since the Paris Accords (October 23rd 1991).

When it comes to those figures, the Cambodian government refrains from officially refuting them, for the simple reason that they were partly calculated thanks to data that the government themselves communicated to those organisations, via the Ministry of Economy and Finance , the Ministry of Planning and the National Institute of Statistics (NIS ) . However, it appears easy for the government to downplay the impact of this today, by proposing in turn its own “estimations” and its “objectives”. The prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, claimed on February 16th in front of a packed audience of international economists, that the Cambodian GDP could well increase by 6%, with a little bit of good will!

Clear skies, showers or typhoon?
Between the bright sun the government would like to dream of, the typhoon forecast by the British group and the skies alternating sunny spells and scattered showers predicted by the World Bank, the IMF and the ADB, it is hard to know who to turn to and trust. Most analysts yet speak with one pessimistic voice. Indeed, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) announces tens of thousands of unemployed people in Cambodia’s key-sectors, which will be the victims of a crisis which would supposedly affect no less than 500,000 Cambodians and might even, by the end of 2009, concern more than a million of them. The French daily newspaper le Monde also adds their own reading of the situation. Indeed, in its February 23rd edition, the Paris-based daily paper did not hesitate to display as a title for their article, “Cambodian economy suffers as a result of its opening-up to the world”, thus underlining the contrast between the golden picture of a country who for the past ten years “had yet mounted the Asian horse of growth” and a grimmer one depicting the economy which at the end of the day, is just that of “one of the poorest countries in the world”.

Short and sickly
It is true that if one simply juxtaposes statistics found here and there on the net, the portrait is not that flattering. “The Cambodian” is pictured as poor (average annual income per capita: slightly less than USD600, according to the government), corrupt (166th country out of 180 in the 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index published by the NGO Transparency International , sickly (with an average life expectancy of 62 years, compared to 72 in Thailand and Vietnam) and short (81st out of 81 countries, with an average height of 5’31” for adult men, compared to 5’38” for the Vietnamese, 5’54” for the Thai and 6’04” for the Dutch), although this last feature is said to be considered a quality http://www.shortsupport.org/ .

Everyone looking for their own figures
Data, even when published in documents and on the Internet websites of institutions well-known for their reliability, is very often obsolete or has been collected using various methods, which eventually blocks the way to any possible comparison. Thus, one can see on the public databases of many organisations (like the WHO , the World Bank , UNICEF , the CIA ...), the Cambodian population was largely over 14 – if not 15 – million inhabitants in 2006... when the last national census counted 13.39 million souls. Cambodians appear to live five years longer or shorter, depending on the sources (ranging from 57 years according to UNICEF, to 62 years according to the WHO)... And they obtained an annual average GDP per capita, in 2007, of USD540 according to the World Bank, when the IMF claims it was USD604.

Indices for developing countries?
Beyond these discrepancies, which can be explained in some cases by the techniques used, the very quality of these indices is regularly questioned. Some estimate that the indices bring a distorted vision of reality and therefore call to create new instruments or to use others which are already set up – this would allow the refining of analyses of economies and societies in the modern world, particularly in developing countries like Cambodia where the informal sector plays an essential part. Pointing at statistical mistakes a posteriori or blaming economic indicators might be a little too easy. But in any case and facing the dark perspectives drawn by those figures, this helps remind that these indicators were first elaborated as tools meant to provide a better understanding of a complex world, and were not invented to remodel or govern it.