Remittances contribute largely to the national economy. The remittances sent home by the migrants affect development at both the household and national levels. At the household level, remittances help to reduce poverty, improve standard of living and attain higher educational levels. At the macro level, remittances could be used for entrepreneurship and productive investment which in turn increases job opportunities and income of the people. At the same time, remittance inflows help to augment foreign exchange reserves and improve the current account position. This paper suggests that workable policies and programs need to be developed by Nepal’s policy makers for encouraging the utilization of remittances for productive use in order to promote longer-term growth.

There is a large volume of literature documenting the analysis of spatial market integration based on individual commodity prices. This paper, instead, contributes to the literature by delineating the existence of spatial market integration using intra-regional price indices. In this context, we use monthly price indices for Kathmandu valley, Hill and the Terai region, which are the only available spatial indices in Nepal. Employing Johansens’ bi-variate cointegrating approach for the period from August 1995 to December 2010, we found a strong proposition of Law of One Price (LOP) across the region indicating the fact that spatial markets are highly integrated albeit speed of adjustment is rather slow. This may be due to the existence of oligopolistic pricing behaviour, carteling, asymmetric market information, and syndicate in the transportation system as discussed in various literatures.

This paper attempts to examine volatility pattern of interbank rate of Nepal using daily and monthly data. The empirical results show significant variation in volatility during the period of study. It depicts the clustering of large and small variances of interbank rate. Moreover, as the sum of ARCH and GARCH coefficients are greater than unity in the daily interbank rate, shocks are highly persistent in the interbank market. However, the SLF of NRB has been observed to lower the persistence of shocks, as the sum of ARCH and GARCH coefficients decreases when effect of SLF and repo are introduced in the model. It depicts that SLF and repo of NRB has been effective to lower the persistence of shocks on daily interbank market, but it increased the mean of conditional volatility. The other important finding of the study is that mean conditional volatility is highest in February and lowest in August

This paper analyzes the money demand function for Nepal during the period of the FY 1997/98 to FY 2009/10 using annual data. The empirical results imply that the cointegration tests clearly show the existence of the long-run relationship between real money balances and its determinants, output and interest rate. The vector error correction model has proved the short-run relationship between the real money balances and its determinants. Furthermore, Dynamic OLS estimation of the money demand function indicate that the sign of coefficients of the output and interest rate were found to be consistent with the assumption of the money demand theories.

One of the methods of measuring the effectiveness of monetary policies is via inspection of monetary neutrality in the economy. It is a concept from classical economics and it suggests that changes in nominal variables do not have any impact on real variables. This paper studies the presence or absence of effective monetary policy in Nepal between 1975 and 2008 by observing money supply (nominal side), and real GDP (real). Results suggest that an increase in money supply immediately lowers the real GDP in the short run, but has no effect on real GDP in the long run. This evidence suggests that Nepal Rastra Bank’s monetary policies between 1975 and 2008 may have been counter-productive in the short-run, but they were effective for long-run growth and stability of the Nepalese economy.

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