header banner

Mukesh Khanal

MukeshKhanal

The author is an economist and a public policy researcher.

Latest

OPINION

Nepal’s FDI Landscape: Issues and Solutions

FDI brings not only capital into a country, but also transfers knowledge and technology from the sender to the recipient country. China benefited immensely from these. To some extent, this has happened in India and Bangladesh, but not so much in Nepal because Nepal’s FDI landscape is littered with i...
Nov 02, 2023
OPINION

The Young, the Old, and the Dependent

Had we been a European country, our youths would have launched multiple revolutions and overthrown their governments. Luckily for Nepal’s polity and the ruling class, our youths have a fatalistic attitude (courtesy of the Hindu belief) and accept the crisis they face as fate. They choose to migrate...
Oct 08, 2023
OPINION

What Ails Nepali Entrepreneurship?

These last few weeks, I had opportunities to interact with a variety of entrepreneurs—taxi drivers, pharmacists, retail store owners, streetside vegetable vendors, automobile mechanics, non-profit organization directors, and for-profit organization directors. One consistent theme that emerged out of...
Sep 21, 2023
OPINION

Talking movies during the coronavirus pandemic

Recent weeks have seen a flurry of news items and interviews about the state of the Nepali movie industry in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
May 14, 2020
OPINION

What plagues Nepali movies?

Recently, two supposedly super-hit Nepali movies uploaded in Youtube caught my attention: Anmol KC starrer “Kri” and Ramesh Upreti starrer “Aishwarya.” These movies highlight major issues plaguing the Nepali movie industry today.
Aug 31, 2019
OPINION

Director and the troll

Whether a movie is actually bad is beside the point. Your movie may win an Oscar, but if I don’t like it, I still have the freedom to shout from the mountain tops that your movie is bad
Jun 15, 2019
OPINION

Humanity and power

Humanity and power have an inverse relationship.  If that sounds like too strong an opinion, let us see two related examples. First, the Armed Police Force’s vehicle escorting Lokendra Bahadur Chand brushed a scooter riding female in the street. The police vehicle did not stop to check if the scoote...
Apr 07, 2019
OPINION

In defense of private schools

Why can’t an entrepreneur open a private school and make profit in the process? Why don’t we let the market decide if it wants private schools?
Jan 15, 2019
OPINION

Renewed opportunity

It is only natural that two centuries of state-sponsored policies by and for the benefits of the ruling hill castes would one day boil over
May 13, 2018
OPINION

Are we prepared?

If matured federal republic like Canada still faces inter-provincial trade war, how can we be confident we won’t experience the same?
Feb 12, 2018