Govt all set to revive Birgunj Sugar Factory

The government has appointed Raj Kumar Singh of Asanpur-3 in Siraha as the chairman of Birgunj Sugar Factory.
Once the seven-member gets complete shape, the government will ask it to identify was for reviving the factory that has remained closed for almost a decade, Yam Kumari Khatiwada, joint secretary at the Ministry of Industry (MoI), told Republica.
According to Khatiwada, the board has Ministry of Finance (MoF), Ministry of Agriculture Development (MoAD) and MoI as members. Similarly, other three members should be appointed from amongst experts in industrial and agriculture sectors.
"We have already asked MoF and MoAD to send their representatives in the board. The MoI will appoint the remaining three members very soon,” she added.
Apart from exploring ways to bring the factory back into operation, Khatiwada said the board will also suggest ways to get rid of 193 employees who have refused the government´s golden handshake scheme. The board will also suggest the government whether or not to hand over management of the factory to the private sector.
Meanwhile, Public Enterprises (PE) Board has suggested the government to hand over the factory to the private sector. “The formation of full-fledged BoD of Birgunj Sugar Factory is line with our recommendations,” Bimal Wagle, CEO of PE Board, said.
Earlier in 2009, the then finance ministry Babu Ram Bhattarai, who is now the Prime Minister, declared that he wanted to see the factory back into operation.

Income mobility as drivers of welfare

In this paper, Loungani develops an analytical framework for the estimation and welfare-theoretic evaluation of individual income dynamics that takes into account these different drivers of income mobility.

Abstract

This paper develops a framework for the quantitative analysis of individual income dynamics, mobility and welfare. Individual income is assumed to follow a stochastic process with two (unobserved) components, an i.i.d. component representing measurement error or transitory income shocks and an AR(1) component representing persistent changes in income. We use a tractable consumption-saving model with labor income risk and incomplete markets to relate income dynamics to consumption and welfare, and derive analytical expressions for income mobility and welfare as a function of the various parameters of the underlying income process. The empirical application of our framework using data on individual incomes from Mexico provides striking results. Much of measured income mobility is driven by measurement error or transitory income shocks and therefore (almost) welfare-neutral. A smaller part of measured income mobility is due to either welfare reducing income risk or welfare-enhancing catching-up of low-income individuals with high-income
individuals, both of which have economically significant effects on social welfare. Decomposing mobility in its fundamental components is thus seen to be crucial from the standpoint of welfare evaluation.