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 […]

This study analyses the impacts of COVID-19 on the lives and livelihoods of workers in the garment, textile and footwear manufacturing in Cambodia, a sector which employed approximately 800,000 people (80 percent of whom were female) and contributed about 70 percent to the country’s annual total export value prior to the pandemic. The analysis examines potential disproportionate effects of the pandemic on women and men, focusing on earnings, consumption and remittances, possible conflicts at home and workplace, mental health, coping […]

In 2020, Cambodia experienced a negative growth rate for the first time in two decades. As a country susceptible to small changes in the global economy, it grew increasingly obvious that Cambodian businesses need a more solid foundation to grow and diversify. Most businesses in Cambodia are small and medium enterprises (SMEs) but they significantly contribute to the country’s employment, domestic economy and poverty reduction. However, SMEs are encountering several major challenges including informality of operation, limited access to finance, […]

The repercussions of COVID-19 resulted in global disruptions to supply and demand as well as shocks to the global production networks. This paper employs a trade analysis approach to assess the impacts of coronavirus on Cambodia’s export performance. Utilising Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) index, changes were analysed using data pre-and post-pandemic to explore the Kingdom’s competitiveness and dynamic export position during this time. We found evidence that COVID-19 has caused a 6 percent decline in Cambodia’s trade in 2020 and […]

Background Cambodia envisages to become an upper-middle-income country by 2030 and a high-income country by 2050. The country also aspires to develop into a knowledge-based society (MoEYS 2014). To support these goals, it is crucial to consider the role of higher education institutions (HEIs), particularly universities, in training, research and service. However, research has shown that Cambodian higher education is faced with many challenges ranging from skills mismatches to fragmented governance to limited research capacity and stakeholder involvement (Heng and […]

The outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) was announced as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020. Its presence has created significant disturbances across society and particularly within education. On 16 March 2020, as a preventative measure against the spread of COVID-19, the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) decided to close all educational institutions. However, in an effort to continue providing education services to students, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS) alongside relevant […]

The Royal Government of Cambodia acknowledges the vital role of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) in developing a high-quality workforce to better respond to labor market demand and contribute to the national development agenda. In the past decade, with support from and collaboration with development partners, the Government has put effort into expanding access to and improving the quality of TVET. To improve quality, the Ministry of Labour Vocational and Training (MLVT) has developed competency-based training and assessment […]

Research from developed nations has shown that later-born children tend to have worse outcomes in terms of health, nutrition, and education. However, evidence from developing countries remains mixed. In our research, using data on 423,848 individuals in Cambodia, we investigate how birth order affects not only education but also occupational choices in this country. Our estimates show that, compared to firstborn children, later-born children have fewer years of schooling and lower literacy skills, and are less likely to participate in […]

This study explored students’ entrepreneurial intention (EI) and identified the factors influencing EI under individual, social and educational dimensions. Using a nationally representative survey conducted in 2021 with 834 university students, we found that many students had a strong EI. From the regression analysis, we can confirm that the development of personal positive attributes, namely, innovativeness, critical thinking, proactiveness and propensity for taking risks, is key to increasing the intention in the Cambodian context. The same can be said about […]

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 […]

We quantify the effects of reopening economic activities after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown on the lives and livelihoods of the workers in the garment, footwear, and travel goods sector in Cambodia. We employ fixed-effects difference-in-differences and quantile regression analyses using a panel survey of 2,000 workers interviewed by phone in June 2021 and June 2022. The impacts are disaggregated by gender. We find that lives and livelihoods of female and male workers have improved since the reopening, albeit not out […]