Nepal's elusive quest for export success meets LDC graduation

Paras Kharel

Working Papers from South Asia Watch on Trade, Economics and Environment

Abstract: Nepal is hurtling towards graduation from the least developed country (LDC) category with a low per capita income and meagre exports. This paper analyses the implications of graduation for Nepal's exports, and suggests measures that Nepal government should take to mitigate the adverse effects. It argues that export success has eluded Nepal despite trade preferences, and graduation could make it even more elusive. The fact that the prospect of tapping the country's export potential is partly predicated on preferential tariffs implies much higher export losses than projected by standard modelling exercises. Not factoring in changes in rules of origin in preference-granting countries adds to the downward bias of existing estimates. All this underlines the urgency of building productive capacity, alleviating supply-side constraints, and strengthening factors of non-price competitiveness.

Keywords: LDC graduation; trade policy; export potential; export competitiveness; trade costs; coordination failure; policy space institutions; coordination failure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F02 F12 F13 F14 F63 O2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2021-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-his and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://sawtee.org/publications/Nepal-elusive-ques ... s-LDC-graduation.pdf First version, 2021 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:saw:wpaper:wp/21/01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from South Asia Watch on Trade, Economics and Environment Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ankur Singh ().