This paper examines the impact of food price hike on poverty in Nepal employing cross-sectional sample household consumption data of Nepal Living Standard Survey III. The findings of the study suggest that a 10 percent rise in food prices is likely to increase overall poverty in Nepal by 4 percentage points. It implies that one percent rise in food inflation will push 100 thousand additional people into overall poverty and 180 thousand additional people into food poverty. The paper also analyses the impact at the regional level and suggests some policy options to contain the food inflation and to mitigate the impact of food price hike on the poor section of the population.

A feature of the recent period of output growth in Nepal is that growth has been uneven across sectors. While the services sector has been expanding, the agricultural and manufacturing sectors have growing much more slowly. In this paper we attempt to explain this fact by investigating the linkages between financial development and sectoral output growth in a vector-autoregression (VAR) analysis. We find that the services sector reacts strongly to increases in domestic credit, while agriculture and manufacturing are largely unaffected. We interpret this finding in the context of a two sector-growth model, by Schneider and Tornell (2004), where credit constraints and the access to international capital markets play a central role. We also discuss the importance of our findings for the goal of poverty alleviation.

Despite causality debate, a number of empirical literatures (Pagano, 1993 and Levine, 1997, among others) suggest a positive relationship between financial sector development and economic growth. Moreover, there remains further debate whether the country’s financial structure exerts differential impact on economic growth. Empirical studies across the countries (Rajan and Zingales, 1999 and Arestis et. al. 2004) suggest that banking sector plays a key role in some countries while the capital market has a lead position in others for enhancing economic growth. In this context, this paper investigates the relative merits of banking sector vs. capital market in promoting economic growth in Nepal. The empirical results using Johansen’s cointegrating vector error correction model based on aggregate annual data from 1993/9 to 2010/11 suggest that banking sector plays a key role in promoting economic growth compared to capital market in Nepal. It may be either the size of capital market is too small to seek the relationship or it is weakly linked to real economic activities. Our result implies that the policy should focus on banking sector development by enhancing its quality and outreach as it promotes economic growth in Nepal.

This paper attempts to identify appropriate methods for government revenues forecasting based on time series forecasting. I have utilized level data of monthly revenue series including 192 observations starting from 1997 to 2012 for the analysis. Among the five competitive methods under scrutiny, Winter method and Seasonal ARIMA method are found in tracking the actual Data Generating Process (DGP) of monthly revenue series of the government of Nepal. Out of two selected methods, seasonal ARIMA method albeit superior in terms of minimum MPE and MAPE criteria. However, the results of forecasted revenues in this paper may vary depending on the application of more sophisticated methods of forecasting which capture cyclical components of the revenue series. The prevailing forecasting method based particularly on growth rate method extended with discretionary adjustment of a number of updated assumptions and personal judgment can create uncertainty in revenue forecasting practice. Therefore, the methods recommended here in this paper help in reducing forecasting error of the government revenue in Nepal.

This paper examines the impact of dividends on stock price in the context of Nepal. A majority of earlier studies conducted in developed countries show that dividend has a strong effect than retained earnings. The study examines whether this is consistent in the context of Nepal (or not) and the implication particularly to the banking and non-banking sector. To achieve the objective of the study, a descriptive and analytical research design has been administered. The secondary data are used to test this impact. In order to examine the impact of dividends on stock prices, a multivariate linear regression analysis has been implied in which current market stock price is taken as a dependent variable and four other variables namely Dividend Per Share (DPS), Retained Earnings Per Share (REPS), Lagged Price Earnings Ratio (P/E ratio) and Lagged Market Price Per Share (MPS) as the explanatory variables. This attempt has been made to test the dividends retained earning hypothesis and to examine the estimated relationship over the period of time. The overall conclusion drawn in this study reveals that, the impact of dividends is more pronounced than that of retained earnings in the context of Nepal. Dividend has a significant effect on market stock price in both banking and non-banking sector.