This was the first time I bought something on the black market. Yet I would have expected to have to enter a semi-legal market for purchasing other items than a perfectly ordinary SIM card. But when the Myanmar government stopped issuing temporary SIM cards in July 2013, the only way […]

This article was originally drafted by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy for Issue 14 of the newsletter “Asian Trends Monitoring Bulletin” as part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Searchlight Process. For more Searchlight content on futurechallenges.org, please click here. “Without aidha, I would not have achieved the goals for my […]

We know a lot about Burma. We know of violations of human rights waged against the political opposition and ethnic minorities, recruitment of child soldiers, political prisoners, refugees, and forced labor. We also know about the ongoing struggle between the military junta and Aung San Suu Kyi and her many house arrests. […]

Cambodia is among the world’s poorest countries. While parts of the economy are making considerable progress, more than 30 percent of the population still live in poverty. Though the government has proposed many strategies – like the the Poverty Reduction Strategy Program, Cambodia Millennium Development Goals and the National Strategic […]

The notion of the resource curse suggests that countries with large caches of natural resources often perform worse in terms of economic growth, social development, and good governance than other countries with fewer resources. The theory posits that countries depending on oil or other extractive industries for their livelihood are […]