Nepal's Investment Climate


Book Description

This book assesses dimensions of the investment climate in Nepal that shape opportunities for investments, employment, and growth of private firms. It includes data and analysis from five surveys on challenges to the investment climate, and provides policy recommendations to address these challenges.




Investment Climate Reforms


Book Description

Private firms are at the forefront of the development process, providing more than 90 percent of jobs, supplying goods and services, and representing a significant source of tax revenues. Their ability to grow, create jobs, and reduce poverty depends critically on a well-functioning investment climate--defined as the policy, legal, and institutional arrangements underpinning the functioning of markets and the level of transaction costs and risks associated with starting, operating, and closing a business. The World Bank Group has provided extensive support to investment climate reforms. This evaluation by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) assesses the relevance, effectiveness, and social value of World Bank Group support to investment climate reforms as it relates to concerns for inclusion and shared prosperity. IEG finds that the World Bank Group has supported a comprehensive menu of investment climate reforms and has improved investment climate in countries, as measured by number of laws enacted, streamlining of processes and time, or simple cost savings for private firms. However, the impact on investment, jobs, business formation, and growth is not straightforward. Regulatory reforms need to be designed and implemented with both economic and social costs and benefits in mind; IEG found that, in practice, World Bank Group support focuses predominantly on reducing costs to businesses. In supporting investment climate reforms, the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation use two distinct but complementary business models. Despite the fact that investment climate is the most integrated business unit in the World Bank Group, coordination is mostly informal, relying mainly on personal contacts. IEG recommends that the World Bank Group expand its range of diagnostic tools and integrate them in the areas of the business environment not yet covered by existing tools; develop an approach to identify the social effects of regulatory reforms on all groups expected to be affected by them beyond the business community; and exploit synergies by ensuring that World Bank and IFC staff improve their understanding of each other's work and business models.




Doing Business 2020


Book Description

Seventeen in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2020 measures aspects of regulation affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity.




Investing in Climate, Investing in Growth


Book Description

This report provides an assessment of how governments can generate inclusive economic growth in the short term, while making progress towards climate goals to secure sustainable long-term growth. It describes the development pathways required to meet the Paris Agreement objectives.




Investing in the Era of Climate Change


Book Description

A climate catastrophe can be avoided, but only with a rapid and sustained investment in companies and projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To the surprise of many, this has already begun. Investors are abandoning fossil-fuel companies and other polluting industries and financing businesses offering climate solutions. Rising risks, evolving social norms, government policies, and technological innovation are all accelerating this movement of capital. Bruce Usher offers an indispensable guide to the risks and opportunities for investors as the world faces climate change. He explores the role that investment plays in reducing emissions to net zero by 2050, detailing how to finance the winners and avoid the losers in a transforming global economy. Usher argues that careful examination of climate solutions will offer investors a new and necessary lens on the future for their own financial benefit and for the greater good. Companies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions will create great wealth, and, more importantly, they will provide a lifeline for humanity. Grounded in academic and industry research, Usher’s insights bring clarity to a complex and controversial topic while illuminating the people behind the numbers. This book sets out a practical and actionable plan for investors that will alter the course of climate change.




Foreign Direct Investment in South Asia


Book Description

During the 1990s, the governments of South Asian countries acted as ‘facilitators’ to attract FDI. As a result, the inflow of FDI increased. However, to become an attractive FDI destination as China, Singapore, or Brazil, South Asia has to improve the local conditions of doing business. This book, based on research that blends theory, empirical evidence, and policy, asks and attempts to answer a few core questions relevant to FDI policy in South Asian countries: Which major reforms have succeeded? What are the factors that influence FDI inflows? What has been the impact of FDI on macroeconomic performance? Which policy priorities/reforms needed to boost FDI are pending? These questions and answers should interest policy makers, academics, and all those interested in FDI in the South Asian region and in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.




Economic Risks of Climate Change


Book Description

Climate change threatens the economy of the United States in myriad ways, including increased flooding and storm damage, altered crop yields, lost labor productivity, higher crime, reshaped public-health patterns, and strained energy systems, among many other effects. Combining the latest climate models, state-of-the-art econometric research on human responses to climate, and cutting-edge private-sector risk-assessment tools, Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus crafts a game-changing profile of the economic risks of climate change in the United States. This prospectus is based on a critically acclaimed independent assessment of the economic risks posed by climate change commissioned by the Risky Business Project. With new contributions from Karen Fisher-Vanden, Michael Greenstone, Geoffrey Heal, Michael Oppenheimer, and Nicholas Stern and Bob Ward, as well as a foreword from Risky Business cochairs Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson, and Thomas Steyer, the book speaks to scientists, researchers, scholars, activists, and policy makers. It depicts the distribution of escalating climate-change risk across the country and assesses its effects on aspects of the economy as varied as hurricane damages and violent crime. Beautifully illustrated and accessibly written, this book is an essential tool for helping businesses and governments prepare for the future.




Economic Analysis of Climate-Proofing Investment Projects


Book Description

Climate change represents an increasing threat to the continued development of the people, preservation of ecosystems, and economic growth of Asia and the Pacific. Mainstreaming climate risk management in all aspects of development is thus key to an effective transition to climate-resilient development pathways. ADB's climate risk management framework aims to reduce risks resulting from climate change to investment projects in Asia and the Pacific. A key step in this framework is the technical and economic valuation of climate-proofing measures. This report describes the conduct of the cost-benefit analysis of climate proofing investment projects. An important message is that the presence of uncertainty about climate change does not invalidate the conduct of the economic analysis of investment projects, nor does it require a new type of economic analysis. However, the presence of uncertainty does require a different type of decision-making process in which technical and economic expertise combine to present decision makers with the best possible information on the economic efficiency of alternative designs of investment projects.




Shock Waves


Book Description

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.




Contemporary Environmental Problems in Nepal


Book Description

This monograph examines contemporary environmental challenges facing Nepal, this landlocked country’s representativeness in the wider South Asian context is both distinct and generalizable. In large part, this is because of its extremes of physiographical structure- plains, hill ranges, mountainous massifs - and wide range of altitudinal terrains, which represent and replicate South Asian and East Asian continental conditions differing as markedly as humid tropical lowlands, sub-tropical hill ranges and temperate to sub-arctic mountainous environments. Associated forest regimes, in which deforestation and reforestation patterns have evolved in recent times, and differing densities of settlement and cleared agricultural landscapes in each of these altitudinal zones, add to the environmental diversity of Nepal. Associated fauna and exotic species are in various states of endangerment especially Bengal tigers, one horned rhinos, wild elephants, crocodile, musk deer, and peasants, to name a few- so that their forested and mountainous habitats as ‘Wild Life Reserves’ also deserve our attention, and are featured in this monograph’s remit.