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Poverty in Nepal drops 2.2 pct a year in last two decades: WB

Xinhua, June 29, 2016 Adjust font size:

Poverty in Nepal has decreased by a steady rate averaging 2.2 percentage points a year in the last two decades but a quarter of Nepalese still live in absolute poverty, the World Bank (WB) said on Wednesday.

In a new report entitled "Moving up the Ladder: Poverty Reduction and Social Mobility in Nepal" released on Wednesday, the multilateral donor agency said that the increased non-farm activities at home and remittance from abroad have been the main factors behind poverty reduction in rural areas of Nepal.

According to the bank, the report is a comprehensive assessment of poverty reduction and social and economic mobility in Nepal in the past two decades.

"The labour income accounted for 52 percent while remittances accounted for 27 percent of the poverty reduction observed nationally between 1995 and 2010" the report said.

Remittance inflow to Nepal is worth around 30 percent of Nepal's gross domestic product (GDP). According to the latest Nepal Living Standard Survey conducted in 2011, Nepal's 55.8 percent of the households receive remittance with each household receiving 741 U.S. dollars (80,436 Nepalese rupees) a year.

Despite steady decline in poverty, there is high degree of vulnerability among households."For every two Nepalese that escape of poverty, one falls back below the poverty line,"it stated.

On average, 45 percent of Nepalis who are not directly poor are vulnerable to falling into poverty.

The recently experienced earthquake and the trade disruptions were major events, but Nepalese routinely deal with a variety of smaller but higher frequency shocks which threaten their livelihoods, erode their assets and limit their ability to invest in the human capital of children, according to the report.

But overall inequality, measured conventionally using the Gini Index of consumption, has been low and stable over the last two decades.

"By global standards, inequality in Nepal is low also relative to the level of development," the report said. Enditem