Cambodia Reputation Monitor

Reputation is shown on its true 0-100 scale (it's already a bounded score, not an open-ended magnitude). Tourism and FDI are shown from a true zero, scaled to that series' own real high point in the window with headroom — not relative to their own low point, which used to make a real value like $1.0B FDI look like it was near zero just because it was the lowest point on screen. Click a legend item to isolate or restore a series; hover anywhere on the chart for exact values at that month. All three are real collected data — MOT + World Bank for Tourism (monthly from 2021, annual before that — no monthly archive exists further back), National Bank of Cambodia for FDI (quarterly back to 2010), GDELT for Reputation — not illustrative. FDI plateaus per quarter, Tourism plateaus per year before 2021, and every series fades out at a genuine gap rather than stopping in a hard edge. On the 12-year view, Reputation goes back to January 2017 (GDELT's tone-history coverage stops there for a query this specific — tested directly) — it fades out honestly before that point rather than being invented, but Tourism and FDI reach all the way back, including the real COVID collapse (Tourism: 6.6M arrivals in 2019 to 1.3M in 2020).

China went from Cambodia's 3rd-largest source market (247k arrivals, 2011) to its largest by a wide margin (2.36M, 2019) during the Sihanoukville casino-investment boom — then collapsed with COVID (46k, 2021) and still hasn't recovered to its pre-boom peak (1.2M, 2025), even as Vietnam and Thailand have. Source: Ministry of Tourism via data.mef.gov.kh. 2015 is a genuine gap — the only year where this specific dataset failed a sanity check against our trusted annual total and was dropped rather than shown as if reliable. A caveat on Thailand and Vietnam specifically: Cambodia's only land borders are with Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos, and 49% of ALL tourist arrivals in 2025 entered by land or waterway — almost entirely via those three borders. That figure mixes classic tourism with cross-border business commuters and families living on both sides, a pattern China's arrivals (essentially 100% by air) don't share. No country-level breakdown by mode of travel exists to adjust Thailand/Vietnam's numbers precisely, so they're shown as reported, with this caveat rather than an invented discount.

Imports and exports are Cambodia-side trade values by country of origin/destination — General Department of Customs and Excise via data.mef.gov.kh. Cambodia's overall goods trade balance (all partners, not China alone) was a deficit of $1.0B in 2023-Q4 (National Bank of Cambodia Balance of Payments, goods account). 22 of 53 registered Special Economic Zones are currently operating (Council for the Development of Cambodia). Cambodia faces a 19% US reciprocal tariff rate (2025) — on par with Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. A pattern worth noting, not asserted as causal: Cambodia's imports from Thailand fell to $151M in January 2026 — the lowest point since mid-2025 — during the same month the border conflict escalated into airstrikes (see the Tone trend annotation above). Imports from Vietnam reached $382M that same month, their own high point over the same window. The two moving in opposite directions at the same time is consistent with a substitution story, but trade data alone can't establish that the second caused the first.

Cambodia's economic ties with its neighbors extend to labor migration too — many Cambodian workers are based in Thailand, and remittances they send home are tracked here alongside trade and tourism. Source: National Bank of Cambodia Balance of Payments, Secondary income account, quarterly, converted from KHR at each quarter's own exchange rate. Cross-checked against the World Bank's independent annual figure (BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT): the two run about 8-9% apart in recent years, same order of magnitude and same trend — a normal gap between a country's own central-bank compilation and the Bank's own adjustment methodology, not a sign either source is wrong.

Textiles & apparel — low-value-added assembly of imported inputs — remains Cambodia's dominant export category by a wide margin, but "Other Manufactured Goods" (chemicals, plastics, machinery, electronics, vehicles) has grown faster in relative terms since 2016. Categories from real Customs HS-chapter codes (General Department of Customs and Excise via data.mef.gov.kh), grouped using standard trade-statistics conventions, not an invented value-added judgment per product — see the source code for the one genuinely ambiguous call (rubber and wood, bucketed as raw/semi-processed). Top-20-commodities-per-year source, not the full export universe, so years aren't perfectly comparable in coverage.

Weekly snapshot of Google's real aggregated "People Also Ask" questions for "Cambodia" — genuinely different from everything else on this page: it reflects what the searching public actually wonders about, not press tone or social chatter. Source: SerpApi's Google Search engine.