Abstract/Summary

Poverty in Cambodia is one of the highest in Asia. Despite the country’s very impressive GDP growth in the last decade or so, poverty remains pervasive specifically in the rural areas. The food and economic crises along with the idiosyncratic shocks of the recent years put the plight of the poor and near-poor at even greater risk. The Poverty Dynamics Study (PDS), as a longitudinal monitoring exercise, helps shed light on the extent, determinants, and nuances of the face of Cambodian poverty against the impacts of major macro and micro developments. Employing a mixed methods approach, the quantitative aspect involved statistical analyses of the panel data on 897 households from nine villages representing different geo-climatic regions in the country. This data was generated from CDRI’s Moving Out of Poverty Study (MOPS) in 2001, the MOPS in 2004/5 and the PDS survey in 2008, with financial and technical support from the World Bank. The qualitative aspect, on the other hand, drew upon analyses of the results of focus group discussions (FGDs) and semi-structured interviews (SSIs) with households and individuals from the same nine study villages. Based on the results of the PDS presented in this report, policy recommendations have been formulated in the hope of helping tailor the government’s poverty reduction policies and advance their implementation.