over land – namely, rights to sell and bequeath— has a stronger association with time allocated to paid work among women employed in agriculture.

Fifth, a cross-cutting finding is that the associations is stronger with the use of dichotomous indicators of ownership of and rights to physical and financial assets, as opposed to individuals’ self-reported asset values. And while the data are not set up to examine causal effects, the findings are consistent across different regression specifications that are used to test the robustness of our results. These include household fixed effects regressions that control with household-level unobserved heterogeneity that may jointly impact individual time use and asset ownership.

Overall, the paper provides a comprehensive overview of the associations between individuals’ time use and individual wealth, as measured through newly available data on individual asset ownership. The findings underscore the importance of examining channels by different subpopulations, relevant for the targeting of policies around wealth and labor, and that can be explored further in future survey methodological work and experimentation.

# 2.  Country Context and Data

## 2.1  Employment trends in Cambodia

Cambodia has maintained high growth and labor force participation over the last decade, but more needs to be understood about factors associated with underlying gender inequalities in economic opportunities. Cambodia’s annual GDP growth rate is among the highest in East Asia and the Pacific region, and has remained relatively stable at around 7 percent annually, from 2013 to 2019. Labor force participation (LFP) rates were among the highest in the region in 2019, albeit with gender gaps. In 2019, the employment-topopulation ratio for men age 15 and older was about 88 percent, compared with 76 percent for women. In 2019, 58 percent of employed women versus 44 percent of employed men were in occupations the ILO has identified as vulnerable, including own-account work (self-employed with no employees) or contributing family work.<sup>5</sup> Furthermore, about three-quarters of the population live in rural areas, but activities have diversified rapidly away from agriculture. Since 2013, the share of employed men in agriculture has fallen from about 48 to 30 percent (and the share in wage and salaried employment increased from 45 to 57 percent). For employed women, the share in agriculture has fallen from 51 to 34 percent between 2013-19, and those in wage or salaried work from 39 to 50 percent.<sup>6</sup>

## 2.2  Cambodia Living Standards Measurement Study-Plus (LSMS+) Survey

The analysis uses data from the Cambodia LSMS+ Survey<sup>7</sup> which was implemented in October 2019-January 2020 by the National Institute of Statistics, with support from the World Bank LSMS+ Program<sup>8</sup> . The

> 5 ILOSTAT Database, 2020.

> 6 The statistics come from World Development Indicators (2019), unless otherwise stated.

> 7 The anonymized unit-record data and questionnaires for the Cambodia LSMS+ Survey are publicly available at: <u>https://microdata.worldbank.org/index.php/catalog/4045.</u>

> 8 <mark>The World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study – Plus (LSMS+) program (www.worldbank.org/lsmsplus) works to enhance the availability and quality of intra-household, self-reported, individual-disaggregated survey data collected in low- and middleincome countries on key dimensions of men’s and women’s economic opportunities and welfare.</mark> Since 2016, LSMS+ supported

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