Abstract
Sandwiched between India in the south, east and west and the People's Republic of China in the north, Nepal is a small landlocked developing country. Its trade policy autonomy is constrained by land-lockedness and open border with India. Despite opening up the economy, it has not fully benefited from openness, perhaps partly due to poor governance and partly due to transit- and customs-related problems. Although these are crucial issues for trade competitive, the WTO trade policy report-2012 is either very polite or lacks a comprehensive analysis on most of these. Since transit-related costs faced by landlocked developing countries can be substantial, just evaluating the progress made in liberalising tariffs and non-tariff barriers can provide a distorted picture of the overall business climate. The future WTO review reports on these countries should have a separate section on transit-related issues to contribute to policy debate on the problems of land-locked developing countries. Despite this, its publication is very timely given the emphasis placed in the current policy debate in the WTO and other international forums on the problems of land-locked developing countries.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1335-1349 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | World Economy |
Volume | 38 |
Issue number | 9 |
Early online date | 2014 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2015 |