The living standards, as measured by economists in GDP per head, are probably lower But the quality of life seems much higher. That is partly the layout of the city, for it still has the wide boulevards of the French colonial era. But it is more that Cambodia is further down the development path and does not seem to have the huge inequalities of wealth that now characterise the big cities of China and India.Cambodia’s development progress has been delayed by the most dreadful of histories, including having 20 per cent of its population murdered a generation ago by the Khmer Rouge. But now it is growing rapidly and the question is whether it can avoid the mistakes made by so many of its neighbours. Here are some reasons for hope.First, it is pricing energy properly. Electricity and petrol are both priced much higher than in neighbouring Thailand, a far richer country.

That has kept the spread of the car down – this is a 100cc Honda moped society – but it has also kept the roads relatively clear of jams. At some stage, the new middle class will want its own cars, just like the middle classes of China and India. But that boom will come at a time when fuel efficiency of the world’s car fleet is much better than it is now. Next, it has not raced towards ever more intensive agriculture, with the result that there is far less rural pollution. Cambodian rice has a particularly fine reputation for quality.

So Cambodia is a net exporter of rice to Thailand and Vietnam.Third, a lot of resource is going into education, with the growth of private sector universities, a boom in the teaching of English and the spread of internet cafes. One, in a way slightly sad, measure of this progress is the switch from French to English. The legacy foreign language is being dumped for the commercially important one. This is bottom-up, demand-led education, not the top-down imposed sort.Further, it is majoring on the forms of manufacturing that it is good at Some 60 per cent of its exports are textiles. You could argue that this is a sign of being at the bottom of the manufacturing ladder, but it also means that it is not in the “me-too” business of making cheap electronic components.