Cambodia is now on the path to economic recovery with projected GDP growth rates of 5.5 percent in 2023 and 6 percent in 2024. However, as a small, export-dependent economy, Cambodia is more susceptible to external environmental conditions and global economic shocks (UNDP 2022). Particularly, the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, the China-US trade war, widespread economic sanctions and other chronic conflicts around the globe still negatively affect the Cambodian economy. These negative impacts include supply chain disruptions, oil […]

This study investigates factors affecting welfare prior to and during Covid-19. It employs analysis of the Cambodia Living Standards Measurement—Plus Survey 2019/20 data, Frequency Phone Surveys between May 2020 and March 2021 to assess socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic. The results point to a range of factors which could contribute to explaining poverty incidence prior to the pandemic. Household resource endowment was an important correlate of welfare, particularly in terms of possession of a mobile phone, ownership of livestock and […]

The Covid-19 global health crisis has caused ongoing economic concerns. It exacerbated pre-existing issues and diminished Cambodia’s poverty reduction efforts with evidence of both impoverishment and destitution. In multiple ways, poverty and the pandemic put more strain on people’s livelihoods and on the relationships between agriculture, migration, debt, education and other tightly interwoven sectors. This policy brief aims to provide a synthesis of selected key research findings and emerging themes from two studies under the Poverty Monitoring Initiative Project (PMI): […]

This bulletin is one of a series produced by the Chronic poverty Advisory Network (CPAN) during the pandemic. It builds on a foundation developed by pre-pandemic qualitative research on poverty dynamics to understand the reasons why people are able to escape poverty, stay out of poverty, become impoverished, or are chronically poor. Additional data was collected during the pandemic, allowing us to map its differential impacts on people’s wellbeing. The pandemic was a crisis of multiple dimensions – a health […]

Youth participation in local politics remains understudied in the Cambodian context, in particular the catalysts for and barriers to youth political engagement. This study hence aims to address youth engagement in local politics from the perspective of both young and older leaders. Drawing on in-depth interviews with local leaders across four provinces, along with quantitative evidence from a 2018 survey of political attitudes and participation, migration and lack of incentives are found to be the key factors preventing youth from […]

Drawing on 203 quantitative surveys with women workers in Cambodia and a further set of semi-structured interviews with 60 original participants, this paper is one of the very first to present empirically grounded research from garment workers on the financial challenges of navigating the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show how in the making of clothes to be worn by Western consumers, poorly paid garment workers are reducing their eating to repay long-term debts and those newly taken […]

COVID-19 has heavily affected Cambodian female garment workers’ economic security and personal well-being. The impacts are on employment, household income and expenditures, mental and physical health, remittances, investment, and savings. Recognizing this as a threat, the Royal Government of Cambodia has rolled out a new measure of temporary wage subsidy as part of a social assistance program for suspended garment workers, to a total of US$70 monthly to mitigate the impacts and support their livelihood. Hence, this study delved into […]

Civic engagement is “how citizens participate in the life of a community to improve conditions for others or to help shape the community’s future” (Adler and Goggin 2005, p. 236). In Cambodia, civic engagement has been promoted by civil society organisations (CSOs) since 1993. The organisations covered by the abbreviation “CSO” are many in Cambodia, but they consist of, and are not limited to, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), youth associations, community-based organisations (CBOs), self-help groups and small clubs. There are around […]

Many rural communities in the Lower Mekong region are vulnerable to the climate uncertainty induced by climate change due to high rate of poverty, lack of agricultural technology, and heavy reliance on the environment for their livelihoods. Rural people are likely to migrate to urban areas in response to the climate impacts and thanks to the rises in the number of cities, urban areas, and industrial zones in this region over the last decades. We selected a rural area in […]

This article analyses how and to what extent state regulation of civil society organisations (CSOs) have resulted in elitisation, i.e., the process of obtaining elite status within and beyond civil society. This is studied in the context of emerging democracy in Indonesia and shrinking civic space in Cambodia. Combining Bourdieu’s concepts of field and elite with strategic action fields, the article uses data from interviews with civil society leaders. It finds different patterns. In Indonesia, elitisation occurs through a process […]

To understand cyber risk in Cambodia and equip policy leaders to oversee it, this paper assesses the successes and challenges of current cyber risk management efforts in Cambodia and throughout the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region. The findings suggest that there is a large gap between the rapid implementation of new technologies in Cambodia and the capacity to govern consequent cyber threats. Further, current efforts in Cambodia lag behind those in other ASEAN member states, and there have […]