Be a Strategic Learner!

Imagine an examination hall; a student who is among the last ten is luckily placed in between two students who are among the top five students of the class, what should be his/her result? Many would believe the result should at least be a first division, might get a distinction staying between the two distinguished individuals. We will get to the answer by the end.

USA is the largest economy in the world and China has been chasing it very closely. Coming to the South Asia region, India is the dominant economy due to its size and volume of trade. Nepal is one of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) of the world located in the South Asia region. When Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) came into existence, an obligation was made for the developed economies to contribute significantly to the developing or the LDCs in the world. This is how countries like Nepal started getting foreign aid, one of the major forms being the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) these days.


The developed economies usually blame LDCs about not being very open to the global economy, being a protectionist. And Nepal is not an exception to it; it faces the blame for the same. Let us have a look into the status of Trade Openness in the table below:

According to the above data of the World Bank, the trade openness of the Developed Economy (USA) is much lower than our country, even India and China. This shows how protective and biased the developed economies are compared to ours and they expect our economies to open up for the market penetration. We have adopted Liberalization policy and established an entity,   Investment Board Nepal in the country; still we are unable to attract the foreign investment. On the other hand, China and India have made remarkable progress in attracting FDI- India attracts more than 90% of the FDI in the South Asia Region. Some of the major investment sectors in Nepal are Hydropower, Health, Mining & Minerals and Agriculture but a concrete regulatory framework still lacks. Dry ports have been planned to facilitate trade but the execution is very weak. Political instability and lack of social and financial security is forbidding people to think about getting involved in trading or investment.

We are happy announcing ourselves in between India and China. Nepal is failing, though it is between India and China because she does not try to learn required skills for development. She does not know how to customize the development policies. The student in the exam failed- neither had sufficient patience to learn the answers nor had sufficient skill to copy the answers! 


Note: This article was published in The Himalayan Times Perspectives

	Nepal	India	China	USA
2009	50.95%	43.40%	46.02%	25.44%
2010	46.24%	46.62%	52.04%	28.64%
2011	43.76%	52.62%	52.10%	31.36%