By A Staff Reporter
Kathmandu, Jan. 31: Minister for Finance, Janardan Sharma said on Sunday that the country lacked development-friendly policies.
“There is a lack of development-friendly structure and policy, and these complexities have created obstruction to development,” he said at an interaction with the economists at his office in Singha Durbar.
Likewise, FM Sharma said that many of the challenges were the offshoot of ambiguous economic policies that should be formulated as per the constitution of the country.

He maintained that politics was the root cause of all problems and said that a consensus among the political parties was necessary to change the situation.
“As there is no consensus among the political parties to create a clear economic policy framework that suits the need of the country, policy is changed with the change in government,” he said. “Actually, Nepal needs a clear political framework citing the main economic policy of this federal republic,” he added.

Experts taking part in the interaction maintained that the economy had not collapsed as of yet, and suggested to adopt pragmatic approaches to stop it from deteriorating.
According to the statement issued by the secretariat of FM Sharma, the experts suggested the government to keep up the policy to control import until there was enough foreign exchange reserve.

They also recommended to discourage the credit mobilisation in unproductive sector, increase agricultural productivity and apply measures for structural change in the economy.
Former Vice Chairmen of the National Planning, Dr. Shankar Sharma and Dr. Min Bahadur Shrestha, former Ambassador to India Dr. Durgesh Man Singh and economists Prof. Dr. Bishwambhar Pyakurel, Hari Roka and Dr. Ram Kumar Phuyal, and other experts were present on the occasion.