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In early January, during our holiday break, Chris Michael, Program Coordinator at WITNESS, and I visited WITNESS’ partner LICADHO, the Cambodian League for the Promotion & Defense of Human Rights, in Phnom Penh.
While we were there, the LICADHO team invited us to accompany their medical staff on a visit to “Andong Village,” a site where evicted families have lived since 2006.
This community of 1380 families made a living as day laborers and street vendors in Sambok Chap in central Phnom Penh. In June of 2006 security forces showed up, tore down their homes, and transported the shaken families in trucks to “Andong Village”, 20 kms outside Phnom Penh. The evictions were executed in blatant disregard of due process and in violation of Cambodian laws, leaving many of the evicted families who had legal possession of their land without redress.
In the words of Chhiv Kek Pung, Founder and President of LICADHO (in addressing the US Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission Hearing in September 2009): “Cambodia is currently facing a crisis in human rights, which constitutes a backward slide in the country’s democratization and efforts to promote good governance.”
On the way to "Andong Village," I shared the back of the vehicle with a young Cambodian woman called Soriya* and her 3 year old niece. She told me that she was one of Sambok Chap’s residents. Her family was able to make a meager living and send their children to school until the bulldozers showed up, made them homeless and deprived them of their livelihoods.
The bumpy road took us to a sprawling field where there is no access to schools, no sewage, no safe water, not even an access road, and thousands of people live in make-shift tents and houses built from debris, providing little shelter. “Andong Village” is nothing more than a barren field that floods in the rainy season, far off the clean water grid. We walked through filthy, contaminated water as we met the families who are forced to live here. LICADHO’s medical team makes regular visits to this community and Dr. Horng Lairapo told me that the health problems are many, and that the children are particularly vulnerable and are dying of preventable diseases. The sheer distance from any medical facilities is making medical treatment inaccessible. He points to a 1 year old girl with severe jaundice and explains that her mother cannot afford the equivalent of $0.40 cents it would cost to take her to the hospital in Phnom Penh.
In addition to providing medical care, the LICADHO team supports communities like the Andong Village in their fight for justice. Soriya* was one of the people trained by LICADHO to use a flip camera to document her family’s eviction. She tells me how her hands were shaking so violently in the face of the riot police that the video she made was almost unusable. I admire her courage, as Naly Pilorge, LICADHO’s highly respected and passionate Director had explained to me how the environment in Cambodia is becoming more hostile to human rights organizations and how threats, intimidation, and persecution of human rights defenders are on the rise.
Naly had also emphasized how, in this environment, she sees video as the way forward in their advocacy strategies and how the WITNESS partnership is enabling her team to work with grassroots communities in making video a permanent tool that documents, undeniably, their human stories of eviction.
Shaky or not, this video and many others are proving increasingly effective in providing a growing record of abuse. Videos that are used to supplement LICADHO’s excellent reports and, together, to pressure to the Cambodian government for justice. This pressure is a necessity as, despite repeated strong condemnations of forced evictions from the international community, the violations continue: Cambodia: Gov'ts and UN demand halt to forced evictions
Now and in the future, these personal accounts of human rights violations are becoming an indispensable tool for just
Microeconomics, like macroeconomics, is a fundamental method for analyzing the economy as a system. It treats households and firms interacting through individual markets as irreducible elements of the economy, given scarcity and government regulation. A market might be for a product, say fresh corn, or the services of a factor of production, say bricklaying. The theory considers aggregates of quantity demanded by buyers and quantity supplied by sellers at each possible price per unit. It weaves these together to describe how the market may reach equilibrium as to price and quantity or respond to market changes over time.
Such analysis includes the theory of supply and demand. It also examines market structures, such as perfect competition and monopoly for implications as to behavior and economic efficiency. Analysis of change in a single market often proceeds from the simplifying assumption that relations in other markets remain unchanged, that is, partial-equilibrium analysis. General-equilibrium theory allows for changes in different markets and aggregates across all markets, including their movements and interactions toward equilibrium.
Production, cost, and efficiency
Main articles: Production theory basics, Opportunity cost, Economic efficiency, and Production-possibility frontier
In microeconomics, production is the conversion of inputs into outputs. It is an economic process that uses inputs to create a commodity for exchange or direct use. Production is a flow and thus a rate of output per period of time. Distinctions include such production alternatives as for consumption (food, haircuts, investment goods (new tractors, buildings, roads, public goods (national defense, small-pox vaccinations, etc.) or private goods (new computers, bananas and "guns" vs. "butter".
Opportunity cost refers to the economic cost of production: the value of the next best opportunity foregone. Choices must be made between desirable yet mutually exclusive actions. It has been described as expressing "the basic relationship between scarcity and choice.".The opportunity cost of an activity is an element in ensuring that scarce resources are used efficiently, such that the cost is weighed against the value of that activity in deciding on more or less of it. Opportunity costs are not restricted to monetary or financial costs but could be measured by the real cost of output forgone, leisure, or anything else that provides the alternative benefit (utility).
Inputs used in the production process include such primary factors of production as labour services, capital (durable produced goods used in production, such as an existing factory), and land (including natural resources). Other inputs may include intermediate goods used in production of final goods, such as the steel in a new car.
Economic efficiency describes how well a system generates desired output with a given set of inputs and available technology. Efficiency is improved if more output is generated without changing inputs, or in other words, the amount of "waste" is reduced. A widely-accepted general standard is Pareto efficiency, which is reached when no further change can make someone better off without making someone else worse off.
An example PPF with illustrative points marked
The production-possibility frontier (PPF) is an expository figure for representing scarcity, cost, and efficiency. In the simplest case an economy can produce just two goods (say "guns" and "butter"). The PPF is a table or graph (as at the right) showing the different quantity combinations of the two goods producible with a given technology and total factor inputs, which limit feasible total output. Each point on the curve shows potential total output for the economy, which is the maximum feasible output of one good, given a feasible output quantity of the other good.
Scarcity is represented in the figure by people being willing but unable in the aggregate to consume beyond the PPF (such as at X) and by the negative slope of the curve.[13] If production of one good increases along the curve, production of the other good decreases, an inverse relationship. This is because increasing output of one good requires transferring inputs to it from production of the other good, decreasing the latter. The slope of the curve at a point on it gives the trade-off between the two goods. It measures what an additional unit of one good costs in units forgone of the other good, an example of a real opportunity cost. Thus, if one more Gun costs 100 units of butter, the opportunity cost of one Gun is 100 Butter. Along the PPF, scarcity implies that choosing more of one good in the aggregate entails doing with less of the other good. Still, in a market economy, movement along the curve may indicate that the choice of the increased output is anticipated to be worth the cost to the agents.