PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) - Cambodia's new jumbo cabinet with 186 ministers is raising concerns among Cambodians about a bloated bureaucracy and greater corruption in one of the poorest countries in the world.

The cabinet's size has wiped out the relief many felt when the country's two top parties resolved a one-year political deadlock during which Cambodia had no working government following inconclusive elections last July.

"I'm more worried than happy," said Hang Puthea, director of the election monitoring group Nicfec. "After solving a crisis of having no government, we now have one of loosely linked parts that will just make things more complicated and even worse."

The new coalition government was formed after Prime Minister Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party persuaded its rival, the royalist Funcinpec party, to become a partner, partly by creating additional ministerial posts to accommodate it.

In the new cabinet, the prime minister is assisted by seven deputy prime ministers, up from two in the previous government. It has 15 senior ministers with no portfolios, 28 ministers and 135 deputy ministers for a total of 186 positions - well over twice as many as before, and 63 more than the number of seats in the National Assembly.

Most of the new appointees are unlikely to have any real duties, but merely add another layer of bureaucracy that can create more paperwork for any kind of official task, Hang Puthea said.

The CPP had no choice but to accommodate Funcinpec after winning only 73 seats in the 123-member National Assembly, short of the two-thirds required to govern alone. Funcinpec has 26 seats.

In Cambodia, as in many poor countries, working for the government can be lucrative despite low salaries. Extracting unofficial payments for processing paperwork - from traffic tickets to million-dollar contracts - is a source of income for many civil servants.

The bribes also provide the lifeblood for political parties as part of the patronage system. But it is a burden for the average citizen in a country where nearly half of the 13 million people get by on less than $1 US ($1.31 Cdn) a day.

Payments by companies to public officials "are frequent, mostly or always required to 'get things done,"' according to a World Bank study last year about Cambodia's investment climate.

The study, which found the country's "bribe tax" among the worst in the world, says bribes in the manufacturing and service sectors are estimated at about $120 million ($157 million) a year.

"We would hope that the new bureaucratic structure doesn't create a new barrier to foreign direct investment," said outgoing Canadian Ambassador Stefanie Beck.

Chea Sina, a 38-year-old policeman and father of two who earns 90,000 riel ($30 Cdn) a month, said the scores of new jobs at the top dashed his hopes for a pay hike any time soon.

"With more people (in office) like this, more money from the national budget will obviously have to be spent on their salaries, allowances, office facilities, fuel for their cars," Chea Sina said.

"I have wished for pay raise, but I have little hope about that now," he said.

CPP-Funcinpec coalitions with the same party leaders also ran the two previous governments, since 1993.

After last July's election, Funcinpec vowed not to join a government again led by Hun Sen, the formerly Communist prime minister, accusing him of corruption and autocratic behaviour.

But with its popularity waning, Funcinpec decided to join the coalition because "they just want to have a piece of the pie," said Cambodia scholar Stephen Heder of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

Heder, however, said focusing too much on the unwieldy bureaucracy overlooks a bigger problem - the interconnected network of economic, bureaucratic and military power that has made Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party unbeatable.

"These guys, their friends and their cronies are here to stay. There's no possibility of alternation of power," he said. "So, there's no real democracy in that sense."

Suong Pin, a 39-year-old motorcycle-taxi driver in Phnom Penh who cast his vote in the 2003 election wishing for "something new," admits to disappointment in seeing the same old faces in the new government. But he has not given up hope.

"I will vote again in the new elections in the future until we get good and clean leaders. I believe good will prevail over bad," said Suong Pin, who makes about 4,000 riel ($1.33) a day.