In the 1970s and 1980s, Nepal was faced with large-scale deforestation due to land clearing, and forest degradation caused by fuelwood collection and uncontrolled grazing by villagers who were the de facto controllers of forests. Centralized management and control was clearly not working.
One of the primary goals of the Enterprise Surveys is to provide high quality data about the business environment based on establishments’ actual day-to-day experiences. This provides much needed information given how little is known about what businesses experience in developing economies. To raise awareness of the recently released Nepal 2013 Enterprise Survey, we provide a few highlights below.
The Nepal 2013 Enterprise Survey consists of face-to-face interviews with 482 firms across the Central, Western, and Eastern regions in Nepal. Fieldwork was conducted between February and June 2013, with survey questions referencing the 2013 fiscal year. This post will focus on a couple of highlights. For the full survey highlights please see the Nepal 2013 Country Highlights document.
Do migrants respond to differences in access to public goods and services in addition to income prospects of potential destinations? This issue is important in developing countries where provision of basic public goods affects not only income prospects but also quality of life. And in these countries, provision of public goods tends to vary widely across areas. In a Tiebout (1956) sorting model, such disparity in the provision of public goods such as roads, electricity, schools, hospitals, etc. should induce people to "vote with their feet" and to migrate to areas with better access to these infrastructures and services.
