Wintergreen is a wild herb that grows in the hills of Nepal that can be used for extracting oil which has several medicinal values. It is being sold into premium-value markets in the USA by doTERRA Inc. doTERRA has a co-impact sourcing partnership with the NGO Choice Humanitarian, scouts the local farmers or entrepreneurs and helps them set up the production business. The difference between the price of the final product and the price that local entrepreneurs get is very high. Despite this, the venture has created a new opportunity for local farmers to make large profit as the cost of production is low. However, the business itself has several challenges from scalability and sustainability aspects. Further, the price is set by the single buyer and the market has monopsonist characteristics; hence, the producer has less bargaining power. Despite these challenges, creating a better business environment enables the export of essential oil and that can be a potential foreign currency source for country like Nepal.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of CAMELS (Capital Adequacy, Assets Quality, Management Efficiency, Earning Efficiency, Liquidity and Sensitivity to Market Risk) based supervision in risk management of A class commercial banks. The riskiness is measured by Downside Deviation (i. e., volatility of returns below minimum average return) and Standard Deviation of ROA and ROE. Using the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) in secondary balanced panel data during major financial development (i. e., 2004 to 2018; BASEL-I-II-III) of all 28 commercial banks of Nepal; causal relationship between supervision and risk management has been investigated. The result shows that the commercial banks in Nepal can reduce their downside deviation as well as standard deviation of ROA and ROE by reducing the Non-Performing Loan (NPL), maintaining appropriate liquidity and by increasing management efficiency. Further, results justifies the relevance of risk based supervision adopted by central bank and interest spread set. However, increased capital base has not helped in reducing riskiness of banks. Overall, the study finds that among the six parameters of supervision (i. e., CAMELS), five parameters (i. e., AMELS in the priority order of AMLSE) are capable enough to reduce the riskiness of commercial banks if maintained strictly as guided by the central bank.

This paper investigates asymmetric oil price pass through on inflation in Nepal using time series data of 331 months from April 1987 to February 2018. The paper applies Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) model to estimate long run and short run asymmetric adjustment of refined petroleum products on Consumer Price Index (CPI). Finding shows presence of long run asymmetric adjustment between price of all petroleum products and CPI. However, when the model is controlled for monetary impact and price level of India, only the price of diesel is found to have long run asymmetric pass through into inflation. The long run cointegrating equation shows unit rise in price of diesel is accompanied by small contraction in CPI in long run by -0.048 units. Meanwhile unit fall in price of diesel is shown to have positive long run pass through in CPI by 0.431 units. This apparent anomaly could be attributed to fact that with rise in price of diesel, demand for cheaper adulterant like kerosene increases thus resulting in fall in CPI Similarly, fall in unit price of diesel could have overall increased industrial demand and other resources which in turn led to significant increase in CPI. Meanwhile, study didn’t find any significant asymmetry in short run between CPI and petroleum products. However, in short run a significant impact on the CPI by actual size of increased price of Petrol and Diesel has been found. Hence, in short run, it shows that it is the size of price increase in Petrol and Diesel; not the price itself that has significant effect on the CPI. Since petroleum products in Nepal are not priced by market, these findings can provide guidelines for future oil pricing in reducing the spillover impact on general price level.

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