Author Narayan Khadka, in his paper on
‘Challenges to Developing the Economy of Nepal’, which published in 1998 in
Contemporary South Asia, argues that the main reason for the underdevelopment of
Nepal was because of poor execution of the policies and plans it formulated.
It’s been more than one and half a decade since the paper was
published, the situation of the country has not been improved much. Some of the
sectors such as media, telecommunication and services sector have been
performing relatively better but the overall macro economy of the country is
still frustrating.
The abstract of the paper:
Nepal initiated a development policy and
plans to both modernize and develop its predominantly agricultural economy only
in the early 1950s. In the last four decades, the country has implemented nine
five-year plans and invested billions of rupees to developed its economy. This
article examines the poor performance of past development efforts in the light
of myriad of challenges, local and global economic and political, structural and
institutional. It includes that the economic reforms which have been introduced
vigorously since the restoration of democracy in 1990 will not yield the desired
results unless they effectively and positively contribute to improving the
agricultural sector, lead to higher productivity and growth, generate increase
mobilization of domestic resources, alleviate poverty and bring greater social
equity.
Further, the author discuss the challenges
of the economy of the Nepal as, Nepal has been experiencing with different
development strategies every decade of so since 1950s. An inflow of aid helped
create a minimum of socio-economic overheads in the country. However, the
country is caught in a poverty trap and despite 40 years of planning and
development efforts, 45 percent of the population have an income of less than a
US$ 1.00 a day. The problems Nepal has been facing with regard to the
development of the economy are not only socio-economic but also geographic and
structural.