Analysing Chronic Poverty in Rural Cambodia: Evidence from Panel Data
This paper uses four years of panel data on 793 households collected during 2001–11 to measure chronic poverty in rural Cambodia and to identify its key determinants. A household wealth index—a proxy for long-term welfare—constructed by polychoric principal component analysis is used as welfare indicator. Both ordered logistic and multinomial...
Foreign Investment in Agriculture in Cambodia
This study investigates the extent, nature, and impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Cambodia’s agriculture sector from 2000 to 2010. Despite agriculture’s vital role in Cambodia’s economy—employing a large rural workforce and contributing to foreign exchange earnings—FDI in the sector remains modest, averaging only 6 percent of total i...
Agricultural Development and Climate Change: The Case of Cambodia
Cambodia’s economy is largely based on the agricultural sector and this sector is the main water user in Cambodia (Wokker et al. 2011a: 1-3). Several studies acknowledge that wet season rice farming is crucially important for livelihoods. With such farming being historically dependent on rainfall, the majority of lowland farmers grow just one crop...
Decentralised Governance in a Hybrid Policy: Localisation of Decentralisation Reform in Cambodia
This paper reviews the progress of the decentralisation and deconcentration (D&D) reform in Cambodia. It revisits the conflicting positive and negative views on the achievements of the reform in the literature. The goal of the reform is twofold: promotion of local democracy and improvement of local service delivery. Both of these goals are the...
Poverty and Environment Links: The Case of Rural Cambodia
Environment and poverty nexus is still a polemical issue. Some schools of thought claim that it is poverty that has the major effect on the environment, while another perspective suggests that the environment has more impact on the poor than vice-versa because the poor have no power to exploit the environment. In the context of Cambodia, there is a...
Decentralised Governance of Irrigation Water in Cambodia: Matching Principle to Local Realities
Cambodia is currently embarked on a significant programme of irrigation development. The technical design of irrigation projects has generally improved, but there remain a number of challenges in the governance of irrigation that inhibit the schemes from working effectively, equitably and sustainably. This study investigates the extent to whic...
Catchment Governance and Cooperation Dilemmas: A Case Study from Cambodia
Integrated Catchment Management (ICM) is a recent ideal approach to be introduced into the Cambodian national strategy on water management to ensure better planning and management of water and other related resources in a catchment. A new multi-level catchment body or a committee is soon to be established as a result. Integral to ICM is cooper...
Hydrological Analysis in Support of Irrigation Management: A Case Study of Stung Chrey Bak Catchment, Cambodia
This study applies the Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) model to assess irrigation management in the Stung Chrey Bak catchment, Cambodia. It evaluates three scenarios—reference, 5 percent annual increase in irrigation demand, and additional reservoir storage—to explore sustainable water allocation strategies. The catchment supports 10,367 h...
Irregular Migration from Cambodia: Characteristic, Challenges and Regulatory Approach
This study investigates the dynamics of irregular migration from Cambodia, focusing on its characteristics, root causes, challenges, and regulatory responses. Drawing on household surveys, focus group discussions, and interviews with stakeholders, the research reveals that irregular migration—defined as unauthorised or undocumented movement for wor...
The Impact of Irrigation on Household Assets
This paper is based on data from 220 selected households surveyed during 2008-2010 and is intended to shed some light on the relationship between irrigation and household assets such as durable assets, livestock, farm equipment, cows and buffalo, and pull/plough animals. Since irrigation is widely seen as being an endogenous variable, the Inst...