High trade costs pose substantial barriers to the process of trade liberalization. This study aims to measure trade costs and explore the driving forces behind the growth of bilateral trade between Cambodia and its top 30 trading partners from 1993 to 2019. Using a micro-founded measure of trade...

Southeast Asia has long been a foreign policy priority for Japan, but Tokyo has intensified its engagement - both with the ASEAN Community as a whole and with individual member states - since 2012. Japan views China's growing influence in Southeast Asia as a major foreign policy challenge and is...

Cambodia's economy is at a crossroads. While the economic recovery continues, its pace remains uneven. The sharp slowdown in credit growth has exposed the economy to increased financial sector vulnerabilities. Policy formulation must ensure a durable and inclusive recovery in the near term and...

Southeast Asia has long been a foreign policy priority for Japan, but Tokyo has intensified its engagement - both with the ASEAN Commu­nity as a whole and with individual member states - since 2012. Japan views China’s growing influence in Southeast Asia as a major foreign policy challenge...

This article examines the role of local industrial relations, specifically workplace unions and collective bargaining, in improving the working conditions of apparel factories exporting to multinational brands and retailers. Drawing on a unique data set collected in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Haiti,...

Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) allows public sector organizations to procure goods and services while maximizing value for money, benefiting society and the economy, and minimizing environmental damage. Cambodia's 2023 Environmental and Natural Resources (ENR) Code emphasizes SPP and...

Purpose - Cambodia's sustained and robust growth performance since the post-reform era in 1993 has been attributed to the boom in inward foreign direct investment (FDI) attracted to the country's labor-intensive industries, where it has comparative advantages. The purpose of this study is...

Transformation of the food system is critical in the face of growing challenges such as climate change. Smallholder farmers in the Global South are particularly vulnerable to these challenges, often living in poverty. One potential pathway to increasing their resilience and income is through...

Pribble investigates the barter economies that developed in many of the labor camps established under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. When the Khmer Rouge abolished currency and markets in 1975, starving Cambodians created underground exchanges in labor camps throughout the country, bartering...

Cambodia is expected to graduate from Least Developed Country status soon, at which time it will be required to make patents available for pharmaceutical products and processes to meet its obligations under the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Given its...

Countries are increasingly adopting industrial strategies and policies in response to global crises and emerging economic trends. With regards to the textiles and clothing sector, industrial strategies and policies, when developed in an inclusive manner, can address economic, social and...

Since Cambodia's first Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD1), the country's economy has continued to grow strongly, reduce poverty and boost shared prosperity. Growth continued to be driven largely by factor accumulation, with limited contributions from productivity, which is not sustainable over...

During the last decade Cambodia succeeded in achieving significant domestic resource mobilization which in turn enabled a rapid expansion of social spending. During the next decade it should shift from spending more to spending better. This Public Finance Review (PFR) informs the next phase of...

A technical assistance (TA) mission was conducted from January 15-19, 2024, to assist the National Bank of Cambodia (NBC) with the further improvement of their Residential Property Price Index (RPPI). The mission was conducted under the auspices of the Data for Decisions (D4D) Trust Fund. The...

In international discourse, school feeding is seen as an increasingly important contribution to social security. Particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, school meals proved to be perhaps the most important means of getting many millions of children from poor and very poor households...

Countries are increasingly adopting industrial strategies and policies in response to global crises and emerging economic trends. With regards to the textiles and clothing sector, industrial strategies and policies, when developed in an inclusive manner, can address economic, social and...

This Technical Assistance Report summarizes the capacity development support on special economic zone management, provided by IMF expert to Cambodia customs administration, including suggested standard operating procedure, materials used in workshop, and advice on the next steps

A technical assistance mission from the IMF's Statistics Department visited Cambodia during April 10-21, 2023, to support the authorities in continuing to improve the compilation and dissemination of government finance statistics (GFS) and public sector debt statistics (PSDS). The mission...

Assessing the current state of the economy and forecast the economic outlook in the next few quarters are important inputs for policymakers. This paper presents a suite of models with an integrated approach to forecast Cambodia’s economy in the current and next few quarters. First, we estimate...

This Technical Assistance Report summarizes the training in investigation techniques, provided by IMF expert to Cambodia customs administration, including a training program, training materials used in April 2024, and advice on the next steps

This master thesis analyses the implementation of the Action, Collaboration, Transformation (ACT) agreement, signed between 20 garment lead firms and the Global Union Federation IndustriALL. The agreement seeks to secure living wages through a dual approach. At the national scale in selected...

This paper develops a "plausible worst-case" scenario for Cambodia to illustrate how a severe, 1-in-10-year flood could trigger cascading impacts, including widespread disease outbreaks and financial instability. The analysis shifts from forecasting to risk management, focusing on the economic...

Cambodia has made incremental progress in modernizing its core government systems since 2020. In particular, the country has improved its scores in the Government Technology (GovTech) Maturity Index (GTMI) from 0.45 in 2020 to 0.58 (out of 1) in 2022. Despite this improvement, there is still an...

Cambodia's export-driven growth has resulted in increased freight demand. Containerized import and export cargo movement has increased more than five-fold over the past 12 years. By 2030, it is expected that trade volumes moving along highways and through ports, airports, and warehouses will...

Cambodia will need to significantly improve its productivity performance in the coming decades to sustain high rates of economic growth and realize its vision of rapidly becoming a high income country. Productivity growth has not been a major driver of growth historically and Cambodia's levels...

This study examines the impact of different leadership styles on technostress within public organizations in Cambodia amidst the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), data were collected from 351 employees working in various...

Cambodia is expected to graduate from Least Developed Country status soon, at which time it will be required to make patents available for pharmaceutical products and processes to meet its obligations under the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Given its...