A preliminary study of the private sector of Nepal's manufacturing industry

Nepal has now entered its fourth decade of 'planned development' begun in 1956 with the launching of its 'First Plan' which, like all subsequent 'Plans' it should be noted, was contingent on foreign aid. One particular consequence of Nepal's dependence on foreign aid for its industrial development is that machine-based manufacturing, at least up to the latter half of the 1970s, has tended to be the preserve of the government. This is true even in those fields of manufacturing usually associated with the private rather than public sector of production, leather footwear, for example.

The data upon which this paper is based was extracted from the 'licence' and registration' records held at the Department of Industry in November 1985. Needless to say, this data needed to be supplemented by data that could only be obtained from personnel of the various enterprises involved, a task planned as part of the second stage of the project. Nevertheless it seemed advisable to publish the results of the first stage of the project in order to disseminate the information gathered, since there is so little available. In presenting the results of the present inquiry, the emphasis is on description rather than theoretical issues raised implicitly or explicitly by the data.