Aid in developing Nepal

Foreign Aid and Politics in Nepal: A Case Study
Eugene Bramer Mihaly.
2002.(Originally published by Oxford University Press 1965).

It is a moot point whether Nepal consumes aid or aid consumes Nepal. Hard research on the aid economy of Nepal is negligible. Barring the routine claims of multilateral and bilateral donors, and the shrewd suspicions of independent sceptics, there is no empirically rigorous and analytically sophisticated assessment that can furnish a conclusive answer to a question that ought to have been answered decades ago. So long as donor slogans remain the only source of development wisdom, the shrewd suspicions will persist. In the meanwhile, both believers and sceptics alike will have to be content with the existing meagre stock of literature, including the 2002 reprint of Eugene Mihaly´s 1965 title, Foreign Aid and Politics in Nepal.

This relative absence of detailed empirically grounded inquiry as a proportion of both the total volume of aid and the extent of donor influence on government, itself merits scrutiny as an exercise in the sociology of institutional academics. It remains one of the most persistent and debilitating paradoxes of intellectual activity in the country that the anthropology of Nepal is as overdeveloped as its economy and the study of it is underdeveloped. While Nepal´s social organism has been so intrusively and exhaustively scrutinised, the extraordinary role of foreign bodies in the polity and economy of the kingdom remains a quasi-mystical trend that is left largely well alone. Perhaps it is a sign of the overwhelming power of hard currency that aid manages to insulate itself from systematic academic study.