From Evidence to Policy Supporting Nepal’s Trade Integration Strategy : Nepal Integration into Value Chains

The rise of global value chains (GVCs) is one of the most important transformation in global trade and investment occurred in the last decades. Once concentrated among a few large economies, global flows of goods, services, and capital now reach an...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Arenas, Guillermo
Language:English
en_US
Published: World Bank, Washington, DC 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/07/26564244/evidence-policy-supporting-nepal’s-trade-integration-strategy-policy-note-2-nepal-integration-value-chains-stylized-facts-policy-options
http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24935
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Summary:The rise of global value chains (GVCs) is one of the most important transformation in global trade and investment occurred in the last decades. Once concentrated among a few large economies, global flows of goods, services, and capital now reach an ever larger number of economies worldwide. Falling transport costs due to important innovations such as containerization, lower trade costs achieved both through a general reduction in tariffs worldwide and by the proliferation of trade and investment agreements, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) revolution, and trends in global business to outsource, non-core business functions paired with a drive towards cutting costs on goods produced for export, have led to, second unbundling of globalization in the 1990s and 2000s (Baldwin and Lopez-Gonzalez 2015). Nepal’s National Trade Integration Strategy 2015 (NTIS 2015) was developed with the objective of enhancing the contribution of the trade sector to growth and to overcome the constraints and challenges associated with trade development and export promotion. This note explores some stylized facts about Nepal’s integration in GVCs and identifies policy recommendations in cross-cutting areas that relate to most of the export sectors prioritized by the NTIS 2015. These recommendations are not meant to be specific to individual value chains or products and are based on the challenges identified through data analysis and interviews with firms in key export sectors and based on good practices observed elsewhere. The report is structured in three sections beside the introduction. The second section presents five stylized facts about Nepal’s exports that are related to GVC participation. The third section proposes some policy recommendations to address the issues highlighted in the analysis. The last section concludes.