Where would you look to find the riel-dollar exchange rate for the last year? How would you find statistics on inflation in Cambodia? Who has studied the economic effect of last July’s fighting in Phnom Penh?
The answer to those questions, at least for Internet users, is “www.cdri.org.kh”—the World Wide Web home page of the Cambodia Development Resource Institute.
The CDRI site, which went online earlier this month, has been kept “purposely simple,” Michael Wills, the institute’s publications coordinator, said Thursday.
That means fewer graphics, fewer photos and less browsing time—a key factor for often-slow local access and a blessing for the earnest academic researchers whom Wills said the site is aimed at reaching.
Included on the site are abstracts for CDRI special reports and working papers dating back to 1996, as well as editions of the quarterly Cambodia Development Review, the institute’s “forum for the discussion of development issues affecting Cambodia,” as the print version describes itself.
The posted Development Review, the latest copy of which should go online Friday, could represent a landmark in Cambodia’s young Internet landscape. Independent economic research on the country—including work on inflation, foreign exchange numbers, consumer price indices and government budget operations—isn’t available anywhere else on the Web, and the institute hopes to expand the site to include a searchable text archive, according to Wills.
(Additional reporting by Debra Boyce)
