A Survey on Impacts of COVID-19 Crisis on Cambodian Households

Project Objective

• To investigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on socio-economic wellbeing of rural Cambodian households
• To examine the effects of government’s cash transfer to help mitigate the shock.
• To assess the role of credit as a coping strategy.

Project Description

The recent coronavirus pandemic has triggered economic crises in both developing and developed countries. In the case of Cambodia, the number of infections is low relative to other neighbouring ASEAN countries, such as Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia. However, several sectors have been seriously affected by the non-pharmaceutical measures and stop in influx of travellers. Specifically, manufacturing sectors have stopped operations to avoid crowdedness in factories, and tourism sectors suffered from loss of tourists.

Coronavirus pandemic could be particularly serious for lower-income households, since they are typically employed in those sectors. The recent increasing NPLs in MFIs might reflect the impact of economic downturn in those sectors. However, there is no empirical evidence on who suffered from the economic crisis in Cambodia. And it should be investigated how those people are dealing with negative shock in their income.

The challenges in the investigation of impact of coronavirus pandemic are lack of data to capture the household behaviour before and after the pandemic. In order to detangle the impact of coronavirus pandemic from impacts of other potential macroeconomic or individual-specific factors on household living standard, we need “panel data” of Cambodian average households.