Executive director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Hadi Soesastro said East Timor has abundant natural resources.

"Moreover, after negotiations between East Timorese and Australian last January on the Timor Gap, there were high expectations about the wealth of the country's natural resources," he said at the launching of a new book titled "Developing New Country of Timor Lorosae" here on Friday.

According to him, the wealth of the country's natural resources at the moment was waiting for being used to improve East Timorese living standard, which were still one of the poorest countries in the world.

He said the poverty of East Timorese could be seen from their average income per day which was only 50 US dollar cents. "At least, through the available natural resources, it can ive expectation to improve East Timorese's welfare," he said.

Apart from that, Hadi also considered that Indonesia's attention to its former province was so little. He said Indonesia was only paid its attention to the little country when there was incident such as shooting each other so that all parties would comment on the case.

Therefore, he said that non-governmental organisation (NGO) "United in Diversity" (UID) cooperated with "Central for Strategis and International Studies" (CSIS) launched a new book titled "Developing New Country of Timor Lorosae" by Hal Hill and Joao Mariano Saldanha.

The book was contained by 21 chapters and it was actually a translation from the original book in English titled "East Timor: Development Challanges for the World's Newest Nation".

The book gave a comprehensive assesment on challenging faced by east Timor carrying out its development.

Apart from that, the book was also contained with articles of wellknown international academicies such as Anne Booth, Peter Timmer, Jay Rosengard, Ross McLeaod, and Gavin Jones.