“Political stability is a must to create business friendly environment,” he said. “Without solving political problems, there is no way we can attract investment.” [break]
Pun was addressing the 34th Annual General Meeting of Nepal Foreign Trade Association (NFTA) in Kathmandu. The minister, who relatively is less experienced in economic and financial matters, said: “To create political stability, we must expedite the constitution writing process, which we hope would be completed soon.”
He also acknowledged frequent labor disputes in most of the industries as problems that were deteriorating investment climate. “But since many of these disputes have cropped up because of activities of trade unions affiliated to our party, we are willing to discuss these issues,” the UCPN (Maoist) leader said.
Former finance minister Dr Ram Sharan Mahat said the country was undergoing ´deindustrialization process´ because of deterioration in investment climate. He cited ´labor militancy´ as the main reason behind the problem.
“Because of this, contribution of manufacturing sector to the GDP has come down to around 6 percent from around more than 10 percent several years ago,” he said.
He, however, said the private sector should not only blame the government or trade unions for problems affecting the manufacturing sector.
“Private sector is also engaged in fraudulent activities and evading taxes worth millions of rupees,” he said, calling the practice of many entrepreneurs as ´forgery´.
President of NFTA, Ashok Kumar Agarwal, however, blamed the government for not putting complete trust on private sector. “The government often talks about inclusiveness, but in practice it always tries to ignore us.”
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