NEWS: August 2015 in review

After having a full house in July, PRIME said goodbye to our Australian interns. We owe a debt of gratitute to the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation for sending over one of their bright young students, and thanks also to Nicholas and Caleb who made a valuable contribution to the team.

Perhaps the most exciting news from August was the translation of our first short video into Khmer. The video we chose was the famous "I, Pencil" story, as produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, with the Khmer translation done by Chhay Kimhorng and the voice by Chhorn Reaksmey.

Once again Gabrielle wrote a fascinating Issue Analysis, this time suggesting a tradable market for endangered animals, which was published at the Cambodia Daily (20 August 2015). The article she wrote with Prum Seila last month about rent control somehow managed to show up in the Khmer Times, and then a Khmer translation was published by the Voice of Democracy... ensuring that our message got out to a wide audience. Seila also continued to discuss important ideas through radio, and this month he had the chance to talk about the PRIME research topic of low-income private schools (10 August 2015).

August was the first month of PRIME opinion polling, with questions asked about regulation, banking, and alcohol. The results have been calculated and the analysis will be released shortly. Looking forward, we expect that PRIME opinion polling will become an intergral and popular part of our operations every month.

This month we also started producing Khmer language "liberty memes", with quotes from Benjamin Franklin, Ayn Rand, Lao Tzu, Nelson Mandela, and Plato. We ran a competition, where people were encouraged to share one of the liberty memes on their facebook wall, and the person who received the most likes won a bundle of books on economics and public policy. We plan to run a competition every month, with the prize being more economics and policy books, but the game will be slightly different each time.

In other news, the Centre-Right Coalition (CRC) meeting has now been established in Phnom Penh, with meetings occuring just before the Liberty on the Rocks meeting on the 3rd Friday of the month. Future Forum has agreed to play host to the CRC meetings, which are invitation only and have Chatham House rules. Please contact us if you want to be involved. PRIME remains in discussion with Future Forum, UQ, RMIT, BitCambodia, Vanda Institute, UME, UBIS, and Zaman University about possible future cooperation, though nothing has been finalised as yet. Expect an important announcement soon... so stay tuned.

Based on our schedule we had planned to have our first Discussion Paper released by August, but our quest for perfection has meant that we have decided to push back that deadline. Rest assured that the research team is still working hard on all of the projects.

#august