TITLE:
A Larger Perspective on Nepal’s Transitional Strategy to Graduate from Less Developing Countries (LDC) to Developing Country (DC)
AUTHORS:
Ihsan Ullah, Yonghong Dai, Nandita Khadgi, Yonghong Qin, Nischal Shrestha, Amir Hamza
KEYWORDS:
Nepal, Irreversible Graduation, Middle Income Trap, LDC Transition Strategy, Climate, United Nations
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.11 No.2,
February
15,
2023
ABSTRACT: Given
the fact that Nepal is right on the cusp of exclusively graduating from the
Less Development Countries (LDC) category to Developing Countries, as the
assessment by the United Nations. It is time to reorient, revamp, and
re-caliber Nepal’s policies to achieve the sustainable, fair, just, and
inclusive growth that Nepal and its people so aptly deserve. Nepal has opted to
graduate in a peculiar time, where the world seems to be facing huge impending
problems such as climate change which has fundamentally changed how we view
development as a process. Nepal is eligible to secure graduation with two criteria
human assessment index (HAI), and the environmental vulnerability index (EVI).
For most of the process, in modern times, Nepal has mostly been reliant on its
development partners and donors to catch up, mostly because this old historic
state has always been rather reactive in terms of disruptive transformations of
the industrial age. Now Nepal has caught significantly up to a threshold that
it can begin to forge its path ahead for the development and realization of its
national goal. For this, the time to think bigger, and larger and the time to
compete with the world has arrived. Nepal should find a way forward that stays
true not only to its rich heritage, identity, history, and resources but also
to match its development mechanism, framework, and process largely with the
world, as the development paradigms transit to a sustainable mode of development,
given the backdrop of human-induced climate change. In such a scenario, the
paper tries to highlight the need for a “pivot” in the
Nepalese economy for a sustainable LDC transition for larger national rejuvenation.
It tries to show how a pivot strategy in such a reality would look that matches
such complexity and nuances of modern times and likewise puts the transition in
perspective.