Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and the ushering in of an era of global economic relations, the United States and Europe have been the core poles of economic power. However, China along with India is increasingly challenging the traditional economic hegemony. An issue of great importance is how this shift in the global economic balance of power will affect developing economies and the transition economies of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), which are located in China’s backyard and […]

This paper investigates the impact of the global financial and economic crisis on Cambodian rural households, mainly focussing on trends in household consumption and poverty, i.e. the poverty headcount ratio, poverty gap and squared poverty gap, using four-period panel data covering the years 2001, 2004, 2008 and 2011. Descriptive statistics reveal that all study villages except Andoung Trach experienced a sharp drop in consumption per capita between 2008 and 2011. As a result, the 2011 poverty headcount ratio shot up […]

This chapter assesses how the global economic and financial crisis has affected employment in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the construction and tourism sectors in Phnom Penh municipality and Siem Reap province.  Key areas of analysis are SMEs’ business performance, fixed assets value, and employment, and support received to cope with the crisis. The methodology involved a survey of 120 SMEs, 60 from each of the two sectors. The global crisis affected the business performance and fixed assets value […]

This study applies the growth diagnostic approach, developed by Hausmann, Rodrik and Velasco in 2005, to identify binding constraints on Cambodia’s growth after the crises in 2008 and 2009. Growth was strong during 1999-2009 at an average annual rate of 9.0 percent, but then slowed to 6.7 percent in 2008 and dropped to 0.1 percent in 2009, before rebounding in 2010 posting 5 percent. Average annual inflation rate was between 1 and 7 percent during 2002-2007, but jumped to 25 […]

This paper studies the role of rural credit in Cambodia during the global financial and economic crisis that began in 2008. The paper briefly reviews rural credit in Cambodia during 2008, analyses rural households’ formal and informal credit demand during the crisis and proposes policy options. The results suggest that household demand for credit increased during the crisis. The demand for formal loans was higher than for informal ones, indicating the important role of the formal rural credit market in times of economic downturn. There […]

This paper uses four-period panel data covering the years 2001, 2004, 2008 and 2011 to analyse the roles of rural income diversification during the global financial crisis. Income diversification is commonly defined as a proportion of income derived from non-farm activities or the number of income portfolios. However, the use of such measures is problematic because the income diversification variable is sensitive to assumptions about the thresholds used to assign households to different income categories. To address this concern, following […]