Nepal's Investment Climate Afram, Gabi G; Salvi Del Pero, Angelica
2012, 03-13-2012, 2012-03-19, 2012-04-04, 20120101
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The objective of the Nepal Investment Climate Assessment (ICA) is to evaluate the investment climate in Nepal in all its dimensions and promote policies to strengthen the private sector. The ...investment climate is made up of many dimensions that shape the opportunities for investments, employment creation, and growth of private firms. Such dimensions include factor markets, product markets, infrastructure services, and the macroeconomic, legal, regulatory, and institutional framework. The report's key finding is that while there are some niche sectors growing and expanding employment in Nepal (including tourism and certain educational and other services), there are many constraints to the investment climate in Nepal that are hindering the development and growth of the private sector. In particular, political instability, poor infrastructure, poor labor relations, poor access to finance, and declining exports plague Nepal's private sector. To overcome many of these issues and move forward, many reforms are needed. Given the extent of the challenge, effective public-private dialogue is required so that the government and the private sector can work in partnership to address these constraints. The pervasiveness and impact of political instability in Nepal makes the investment climate in the country comparable more to Afghanistan than other countries in the region or the comparator countries used in the analysis. While this comparison is unflattering, it is true. Political instability has stifled growth and limited Nepal's ability to exploit its hydropower and tourism potential. Interestingly, many firms do not perceive access to land and finance as major obstacles. This could be a reflection of lack of dynamism: Nepalese firms are simply not planning to invest, expand, and grow in their unstable and unpredictable environment. The peace dividend is not difficult to measure. As the surveys show, ending civil unrest alone would give back to enterprises 44 working days a year. The effects on economic activity, investment, growth, and job creation could be potentially huge.
This book reviews the experience of the MENA region with poverty and human development since the mid-1980s. It finds that poverty rates did not decline by much during this period while health and ...education indicators improved substantially. The stagnation of poverty rates is ascribed to the stagnation of the region?s economies during this period while the improvement in human indicators is likely due to several factors including improvement in the delivery of public health and education services.
Why does poverty persist? A critical, but so far ignored, part of the answer lies in the fact that poverty is regularly created. Large numbers of people are escaping poverty, but large numbers are ...concurrently falling into chronic poverty. This book examines the reasons why people fall into poverty and how they escape it in diverse contexts. Drawing upon personal interviews with 35,000 households in different parts of India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, and the United States, it takes the reader on an illustrative journey, filled with facts, analyses, and the life stories of people who fell into abject poverty and others who managed to escape their seemingly predetermined fates. Letting a farmhand's son or daughter remain a farmhand, even though she or he is potentially the next Albert Einstein, is a tragedy that poor people witness time after time. Remedying this situation is crucial for making poverty history. This book addresses how equal opportunity can be promoted and how slum-born millionaires can arise in reality. Speaking to Barack Obama's message for more effective health care, the book feeds directly into current public debates.
Poverty in Zimbabwe increased significantly during the 1990s, and it increased in all sectors of the economy. In the middle of the decade, more than 60 percent of Zimbabwean households fell below the ...national poverty line. There are competing reasons for this: some say it was the result of the government instituting the Economic Structural Adjustment Program (ESAP), and others say that ESAP ' s effectiveness was hampered by recurring drought. This document sheds light on the sources of the increase in Zimbabwean poverty, with the use of non-parametric, and parametric statistical methods. These techniques support the conclusion that the drought, though harmful, does not entirely explain the increase in poverty. The deteriorating economic environment, reducing the returns to both human, and physical assets, also had profound effects on household well-being. What are the prospects for improvement in the near future? Only serious structural changes to the economy can create labor market conditions, conducive to long-term, broad-based growth.
The final book from a towering pioneer in the study of poverty and inequality-a critically important examination of poverty around the world
In this, his final book, economist Anthony Atkinson, one ...of the world's great social scientists and a pioneer in the study of poverty and inequality, offers an inspiring analysis of a central question: What is poverty and how much of it is there around the globe? The persistence of poverty-in rich and poor countries alike-is one of the most serious problems facing humanity. Better measurement of poverty is essential for raising awareness, motivating action, designing good policy, gauging progress, and holding political leaders accountable for meeting targets. To help make this possible, Atkinson provides a critically important examination of how poverty is-and should be-measured.
Bringing together evidence about the nature and extent of poverty across the world and including case studies of sixty countries, Atkinson addresses both financial poverty and other indicators of deprivation. He starts from first principles about the meaning of poverty, translates these into concrete measures, and analyzes the data to which the measures can be applied. Crucially, he integrates international organizations' measurements of poverty with countries' own national analyses.
Atkinson died before he was able to complete the book, but at his request it was edited for publication by two of his colleagues, John Micklewright and Andrea Brandolini. In addition, François Bourguignon and Nicholas Stern provide afterwords that address key issues from the unfinished chapters: how poverty relates to growth, inequality, and climate change.
The result is an essential contribution to efforts to alleviate poverty around the world.
China is undergoing a campaign which is called “The Targeted Poverty Alleviation Policy” to eradicate extreme poverty from rural China until 2020. Though poverty in rural China has been studied ...intensively in different objective dimensions, little attention has been paid to poverty line settings and subjective poverty, which are hinged to the policy effects. In order to fill in the research gap, this study employs a nationally representative survey of rural households in 2016, to measure subjective poverty in rural China, and analyze the determinants as well. Our results indicate that the mean subjective poverty line of the rural households is 8297 yuan per capita, which is far higher than the national poverty line (2800 yuan). Statistically, 29% of the surveyed rural households who are not objectively poor feel subjectively poor. The objective poverty line cannot fully reflect the subjective poverty perception. Thus, how to reduce the subjective poverty perception could be a major policy agenda in rural China after 2020, when extreme poverty is no longer a problem.
The paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways. First, it proposes a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components. Second, it provides ...corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate the importance of vulnerability and transient poverty. Third, it applies these tools to the measurement of chronic and transient poverty in China using a rich panel data set that extends over 17
years. Alternative measurement techniques are found to yield significantly different estimates of the relative importance of chronic and transient poverty. The precision of the estimates is also considerably enhanced by simple statistical corrections.
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