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This paper aims to examine the role of financial development and economic growth in Nepal employing Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach of cointegration using time series data for the period from 1965 to 2018. Nepal is a unique country with big markets in the neighbors-India and China but remains as one of the poor landlocked developing countries, even being the earlier entrant in liberalization and reform. Nepal recently went through a substantial political transition and now the stable government is seeking substantial amount of foreign direct investment. In this background, it will be better, for a good policy analysis, to know how the financial activities have played the role in highly intended economic growth. We develop a model with five proxies of financial development (broad money, domestic credit to private sector, total credit from banking sector, capital formation, and foreign direct investment); and econometrically test their contribution in economic growth. Overall, the results suggest that financial development causes to economic growth substantially, except in the case of foreign direct investment. This result warns the policy makers to be more serious making investment friendly economy to attract the expected foreign direct investment.

Despite a large growth in domestic and international migration and remittances in recent decades, there are limited works that systematically identify and establish interactions between internal and international migration. Using primary data from new urban areas of Nepal, we identify households that had migrated from rural to urban areas, explore their migration practices and educational investment behaviors, and analyze the effects of international migration and remittances on investment in education.The results show that, despite their lower income and consumption, migrant households that have members abroad have higher human capital investment measured by the level and budget share of expenditure on children's education and the time their children spend for studying at home than do urban-native and other types of migrant households. Our findings suggest that searching for better education is one important motivation for migrating to urban areas among rural households having members abroad.

Cooperatives play important role in economic development via multiple channels, particularly, in developing countries' cases. Considering this fact, Nepal's constitution 2017 has incorporated the cooperative as one of the three pillars of her economy. This paper aims to analyze the role of cooperatives in the economic development of Nepal. For this, first, this paper documents the trend and pattern of Nepalese cooperatives' evolving structure, then moves to the econometric estimation to analyze the role of cooperatives in economic growth employing an advanced methodology. Looking at the properties of time series data for the period of 49 years from 1970 to 2018, the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach of cointegration is employed. The major finding is that the development of the cooperatives has a long-run relationship with economic growth. However, the focus should be seen as on the involvement of many people in the cooperatives' activities rather than just on amassing the cooperatives' capital. The results also suggest that there is a need for the attention of policymakers so ensure that share capital contributes to economic growth. Therefore, the areas of priorities and scope of work of cooperatives need to be reconsidered when formulating new policies related to cooperatives.

This paper explores the economic performance of rural-urban migrant households in the recently flourishing urban areas of Nepal. Using nationally representative primary survey data, we find that upon their arrival, these migrant households have 24 percent less income and 13 percent less consumption than their local counterparts but converge to equal levels of income and consumption after 10 and three years, respectively. Our results suggest that a higher level of education accelerates the speed of assimilation. Compared with the Mountain/Hill regions, migrants in the prosperous Tarai region possess a lower level of welfare upon arrival but exhibit more rapid assimilation.