This paper assesses the contribution of foreign employment and remittances to Nepalese economy and also identifies the information needs and gaps. An attempt is also made to assess the role of remittances in poverty reduction. At a time when the country’s major economic indicators are not favorable, the remittances have played a vital role in maintaining macro economic stability and keeping the economy afloat. Though remittances sent home by migrant workers is a boon to the economy, the facilities are inadequate to back up the increasing trend of migration. Inadequate information on foreign employment, lack of skill training and lack of assurance of safe working environment and rights of the migrant workers have obstructed foreign employment. Formulation and effective implementation of pro poor migration policy is the need of today. The government should play a proactive role to promote foreign employment by inducting and adhering to the policy of economic diplomacy. Replicating the best practice of the region has to be endorsed in our national context for promotion and regularization of foreign employment, to encourage official transfer of remittance and to streamline the asset and skill of the returnees for the economic development of the country.

With a view to explain the long-run and cyclical behaviour of private savings in Nepal during the period 1974-2005, the study employs an error-correction framework. The study estimated 0.309 as marginal propensity to save with the corresponding value of 0.365 in the long-run. The estimation results reveal that real income, real government savings, real foreign savings, real interest rates, and labour market constraints play important roles in determining private savings in the short and long-run. The findings of the study suggest that there is a need to focus on development policy which increases productive base of the economy in order to increase income growth and reduce unemployment. It is also important to note that the real interest rates have a positive influence on the private savings and can be taken as an important policy variable in Nepal.

Since the beginning of development discourse based on dualism of development versus underdevelopment, particularly since the end of World War II, a large number of explanations and theorized school of thoughts have come to fore. Despite so many theories and models about development in place, so much technological and scientific advancement mainly in communication and transportation, the extent of underdevelopment is more rampant than ever before. The income of the richest 1 percent (50 million) is the same as the income of the poorest 60 percent (2.7 billion people) of the world. More than half of world population survives by less than US$ 2 a day. Apparently, these development theories have practically failed to address the problem of underdevelopment of the world. This reality–both in development discourse and development practice�make it imperative to rethink, mainly to specifically point out the causes of seemingly inescapable trap of poverty and underdevelopment. The recognition of the human capital flight as the most crucial cause of underdevelopment provides new basis for development discourse. On the contrary, Nepal has remained as one of the highly underdeveloped countries, the reason of which could be attributed to human capital flight.

The HIPC Initiative was established in 1996 with the prime goal of reducing eligible countries’ debt burdens to the thresholds fixed under the Initiative. There are both costs and benefits associated with participation under the Initiative. For many interim HIPCs, the challenges in meeting their completion point triggers pertain to maintaining macroeconomic stability, preparing participatory Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) as well as other country-specific triggers. At the completion point, full debt cancellation under the MDRI is granted. Nepal is one of the ten pre-decision point countries potentially eligible for participation under the Enhanced HIPC Initiative. The possible conditions linked to the country’s entry to the HIPC Initiative, the level of existing concessionary foreign assistance that could be non-concessionary and the likely possible debt situation after reaching the completion point are some of the issues that need a re-examination.

This paper investigates the effects of tourism industry on gross domestic product (GDP) and finds a significant positive relationship between tourism financing and GDP. Moreover, the role of various sources of tourism financing, including government financing and the loan financing of banks and financial institutions, on economic growth has also been examined and the result supports the conventional wisdom that there is significant positive relationship between the variables. This paper uses primary data collected from the field survey during February – April 2006 and the secondary data utilizing 30 annual observations from FY 1974/75 to 2004/05. Both the level and logarithmic form data are examined using the OLS estimation method and the Cochrane-Orcutt (C-O) iterative procedure is applied considering the robustness of the model.

There is a significant positive relationship between inflation and inflation expectations in Nepal, where the latter variable has been generated under Adaptive Expectation Hypothesis (AEH). Using 33 annual observations of actual inflation from 1973 to 2006, one percent increase in inflation expectations has 0.83 percent impact on contemporaneous inflation. The forecastability of inflation expectations on current inflation is higher than that of the expected inflation proxied by one-period lagged inflation. The forecastability of the model has been examined on the basis of minimum Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). Therefore, it is desirable for the policymakers to consider inflation expectations while formulating monetary policy to anchor inflationary expectations of the economic agents.

The study focuses on market reaction to announcements of new unanticipated political events using the event analysis methodology. The findings of the study provide a consistent conclusion regarding the existence of information content hypothesis in the Nepalese stock market. The study reveals that good-news (bad-news) political announcements generate positive (negative) abnormal returns in the post-event period. The data present important evidence on the speed of adjustment of stock prices to new political information, i.e., in as many as 2 to 3 days from the announcement date. Thus, this paper finds that the Nepalese stock market is inefficient at a semi-strong level, but there is a strong linkage between political uncertainty and common stock returns.